Street of Angels

by

Joe Derkacht

Smashwords Edition



****



Street of Angels
© Copyright 2009 by Joe V. Derkacht
All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction.  All names, locales, and incidents are either fictitious or used fictitiously and are the products of the author’s imagination.  Any resemblance to real persons living or dead, or to actual places and incidents, is purely coincidental.

Scripture quotations are from the KJV or are the author’s paraphrase.

Cover art is by the author, Joe V. Derkacht.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.  This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people.  If you would like to share this book with another person, please *purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with.  If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.  Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

*Though this Smashwords Edition is being offered to readers for free, please return to Smashwords for additional downloads for sharing with others.  The author can better gauge interest in Street of Angels by that means.



****



Street of Angels

Foreword

Some people don’t think I should have written this book.  Maybe I should put that differently.  Some people don’t think I should have been the one to write it.  Who do I think I am, anyway, especially with nothing but a jailhouse education?  It’s not like I’ve lived here in Calneh, Alabama, one of the Deep South’s sorrier cities, for all my life, either.  What do I know about these people, the way they think, the way they talk?  Aren’t I really just a newcomer, when it comes down to it?
All good questions, I guess.  My only answer is that I live here now and that I’m the one who talked to all these people and either knew or know them well and was willing to dig up a fact or two that no one else seemed interested in doing.  Most importantly, I guess I’m the one who had the time and inclination to do all those things and then actually sat down to write it all out.  Whether or not (not, to be perfectly honest) everybody in this neighborhood likes me, or thinks I am or used to be a pretty big jerk, this is still the only book anybody ever wrote about Flowers Avenue or is ever likely to.
Which brings up the question of why anyone would want to write about a poor neighborhood (the ’hood, to some) in the wrong part of Calneh, and especially about things that happened “way back when,” when things were much worse than they are now.  Why not write, as I’ve been asked, about one of Calneh’s Civil War heroes, or about the resurrection of its old Southern mansions, or even something about why the Japanese chose to build an auto parts factory here?
For everyone who asks those kinds of questions, I have a question of my own.  If you lived in a neighborhood where angels sometimes walked the streets, wouldn’t you want to write about it, too?  Now there’s a question for you.



****



Part One

Chapter 1

While Flowers Avenue Baptist Church’s Rev. John Hankins (Reverend Johnny, to his parishioners) wasn’t much of a preacher, unless you think reading from a typewritten script is the same as preaching, he did have a certain flair for church growth.  If he had learned anything from his seminary days, it was that if you involved the kids, sooner or later you’d also have their parents.  That explained his first act as pastor, that summer of 1955, erecting two basketball hoops and painting court boundary lines in the church parking lot.
The boys from the north side of the street soon regularly flocked to Flowers Baptist for Sunday afternoon basketball.  Afterwards, they sat around eating snacks provided by the church, and Rev. Johnny, daring to appear without notes, even, would give them the gospel.
What happened next wasn’t quite as Johnny had planned.  After a month or so of seeing the sweaty young men playing their games in the church parking lot, some of the girls in the neighborhood began to show interest.  Did the guys want to play ball with them?  Nowadays, nobody would probably think twice about such a proposition.  They’d simply wave the girls in, and they’d be playing head-to-head against the guys and probably winning--at least some of the time.  Trouble was, back then in the 1950s, in the South, the whole idea was more than a bit scandalous.  But Rev. Johnny knew something good when he saw it.  The guys were hearing the gospel and becoming involved, so now maybe he could involve the young girls and after that everyone’s parents, and soon he would have himself a thriving congregation.
Basketball, though, especially against the boys, was not the right vehicle.  It would have been too unladylike.  It was his wife (willowy but deceptively athletic, always a mean spiker at church camp volleyball games) who came up with the idea of switching from basketball to volleyball.
Volleyball?  To his mind, it just did not have the same appeal.  There wasn’t the masculine quality, the drive through the key, weaving in and out of defenders to go on the attack.  Besides, he hoped to point someday to one of the boys playing college basketball and be able to say he’d a hand in shaping the young man’s life.  Who could tell?  Maybe a few of the boys would go on to play professional ball.  That was, of course, in addition to the boys he hoped would go to Oklahoma Baptist, where he had gone to college to prepare for the ministry.
After considerable nudging from his wife, whose sharp elbows could be awfully persuasive, he broached the subject of volleyball the next Sunday afternoon with the boys.
Volleyball?  This was long before the era of surf, sand, and sun, where golden tans predominate and the possibility of all that media exposure, meaning it did not have the same cachet as it would today.  In fact, it did not go over all that well with the guys, and he had not so much as even mentioned the girls.  Just at the moment they were about to take a vote, one surely doomed to failure, Reverend Mrs. Johnny pulled up in their two-tone, green-on-beige, Chevy Bel Air, the same ’53 coupe in which he had screwed up enough courage to propose marriage one night shortly after graduation from Oklahoma Baptist.
“Ummh, men,” he said, prudently waxing fervent.  “I know it would be a bit of a self-sacrifice, but there is something else we need to consider here.  As good Christians, and that’s what we’re learning about here, you sometimes are faced with decisions that may not seem the most pleasant.  Sometimes you have to sacrifice for the common good, I mean.  That’s something we learned in our little talk last week, wasn’t it?”
Actually, his talk the week before had been about how to be saved, which was what he always talked about, whether Sunday mornings, Sunday nights, Wednesday nights, or Sunday afternoons with the boys.  But he was pretty sure he had thrown in something appropriately related from the lesson on Moses and The Burning Bush, where Moses had to remove his sandals, for it was holy ground.  Anyway, he figured they understood his point.
By now, the boys were looking downright popeyed.  Few of them had been to church much before, except maybe to Vacation Bible School during summers a few times when they were younger, but here he was, stringing together words like self and sacrifice.  What did he mean by it?  Was he to start charging them for the snacks the church provided?  If so, only one or two of them could pay.  The rest could barely support their popcorn habit or their worse addiction to Junior Mints when they went to the Paramount Theater.  Even then some only made it to the latest movie because Billy Ray was an usher and would sneak them in through the back door for free--a grand old tradition practiced far outside the bounds of the South.  Or were self and sacrifice prelude to something far worse?  Did he mean to jump them about their bumming the occasional cigarette from friends, or for smoking butts discarded by their parents?
“What I mean boys--men,” he corrected himself, “is that with volleyball, we could include a lot more people.  We are trying to reach people for the Lord, aren’t we?”
Brenda’s flats clack-clacked on the pavement as she drew closer, and her hip-length blonde braids flew.  The boys were silent.  He seemed to have lost them.  Were they wondering if the old folks from the church wanted to join in, walking canes and all?  Or did they worry maybe it was Brenda, and they were thinking about contending with those sharp elbows of hers when she was driving the key?
“Who do you mean, Rev?”  Ronnie Tatum asked, self-consciously raising his hand.  “D’ya mean the--the Negroes?  Are we supposed to be reachin’ out to them?”
“No, no, I didn’t mean the Negroes,” he answered hastily.  “I doubt they would want to play ball with us anyhow.  What I meant was there are quite a few girls--gals of your own age--in the neighborhood, who would like to join us on Sundays.  Do you think you’re up for it guys, playing volleyball instead, or is that asking too much?”
There.  He’d finally said it.  Brenda stood beaming at his side, one of her braids having worked itself free in all its blonde, madcap effulgence.  She was his angel.  She stood two inches taller than he, even in her flats, but she was his angel.
“Girls, huh,” one of the boys muttered.  “I dunno,” another said.  “Does that mean we’d have to play sissy rules?  I mean, they’re always afraid of hurting somebody’s feelings an’ all, you know.”
Brenda hooked one arm inside of Johnny’s, and turned on her highest wattage smile.  “Fellas, it’ll be fun, and y’all know it!  Besides, it won’t hurt you none to meet a few of the girls in the neighborhood.”
They stared at her, suddenly still and oddly silent.  Didn’t she know three-quarters of them were their sisters or cousins, for gosh sakes?  What was she trying to say?
“Look, men,” Rev. Johnny said, lowering his voice in a conciliatory tone, “we can give it a couple weeks.  If it doesn’t work out, we’ll go back to basketball.”
He tried not to wince, as Brenda pinched his arm.
“I dunno.  Why can’t we just go back to basketball right now?”
“Just two weeks, fellas,” he pleaded, bracing himself for a second, harder pinch.  “I promise.”
“Oh hell--heck, I mean, Rev.  Sorry, ma’am,” Ronnie Tatum said.  “The girls’ll be fun.  We won’t have any problems with ’em.”
“I could just hug you, Ronnie Tatum!” Brenda gushed.
“Oh, no need, Mrs. Rev,” Ronnie said, warily eyeing her sharp elbows and bouncing the basketball on the blacktop.  “No need.”
After a few weeks the guys figured they liked playing volleyball with the girls.  Naturally the girls were annoyed with the boys for insisting they replay a point whenever someone missed her serve or failed to return for volley.  The church did grow as a result, but it was not always in the way Brenda or Johnny wanted.  Two of the girls were pregnant within the year, and Ronnie Tatum married one of them (not his cousin).  Come to think of it, though, it was never clear whether Ronnie was the responsible party in the first place, and he and the girl eventually became serious about church and even went on to Oklahoma Baptist, where Rev. Johnny had received his Bible training and played a little basketball.



****



Chapter 2

Next door to Flowers Avenue Baptist Church where Reverend Johnny, the white minister, read out his sermons from the pulpit each Sunday and Wednesday, daring to peek up from his script only when turning a page, there was the McIlhenny place.  Set way back from the street on an outsized, overgrown lot, the house was one of those where the porch went all the way around, so as the family could set out its rocking chairs on summer days to take in the sights (those “sights” being mostly slow-moving traffic composed of a few raggedy old pickups chased by barking dogs, or kids playing softball with a half-busted bat that’s gonna kill somebody if they don’t wrap another roll of black electrical tape around it).
Sharing space with a few trees, a shacky standalone garage, and weeds barely penned in by a battle-scarred picket fence, no one would claim that the McIlhenny place raised the neighborhood’s property values.  The house’s only saving grace was that its white paint was not peeling--so far.  Ol’ Leonard McIlhenny (no relation to the Louisiana McIlhennys of Tabasco renown) had painted the house just a few weeks before his passing.  (Well, he called it painting; most folks would have said he rubbed it into the wood, the preferred method to someone of his penny-pinching ways.)  As anyone could have told Leonard, if he’d been inclined to listen, he should have raised the house and put in cinderblocks or poured concrete for a new foundation, instead of worrying about paint.  As things now stood, the rot would one day reach right up from the ground and claim the house just like it had a number of other places in the neighborhood, if the bugs didn’t do the job first.
Of course, being dead, Leonard left all such worries to his widow, Stella Jo, and to her son Michael, the poor cripple everyone knew only as “Angel.”
#
Stella McIlhenny was busy cleaning house, with dust rising around her and the Hoover like rain clouds coming up off the Gulf.  Saturdays were for cleaning, since Sundays were the Lord’s Day, which everyone knew was for rest, (and she would have rested plenty on Sundays, if not for opening the church early to air it out and to stoke the ancient boilers, and then playing piano for the choir and sitting through the services) followed by the usual chicken dinners with her son and the occasional guest.
Her cleaning was not what it had once been, and now that she saw she had been slacking greatly in her duties, it was time to whip herself into shape.  She couldn’t understand why no one had said anything.  Wasn’t one of the ladies of the church always dropping by for some reason or another?  Couldn’t they have said something, laid out a few broad hints, maybe?  It was as if scales had fallen from her eyes, and for the first time she was seeing the garbage she’d let pile up since Leonard’s passing.  There must be three years of newspapers scattered throughout the house!  In the kitchen, she had to fight her way past grocery sacks filled with the refuse of countless dinners, lunches, breakfasts.  She was lucky she didn’t have rats!  Lucky, lucky, lucky!
Her three ancient cats, asleep on the kitchen table, one of the only free spaces in all the house, scattered as she shoved the wand of the Hoover at them.  Poor Angel! she exclaimed to herself.  How had he managed in all this mess?  It must be due to the recuperative powers of a 10-year-old.  She was lucky he had not contracted some horrible disease, dragging himself everywhere on his hands... Maybe this garbage was why he spent so much time in the yard, and why she had to fight to have him come into the house at night?
God is good, God is merciful!  His lovingkindness is everlasting!  “Isn’t that true,” she mumbled, as a phrase from the Psalms popped into her mind.
She turned off the Hoover, which was wheezing because its bag needed replacing, and reached for one of the sacks of garbage cluttering the kitchen floor.  It was time to start a fire in the burn barrel out behind the garage.  But as she leaned over, she thought she heard screams.
“Merciful God in heaven!” She exclaimed.  “What is all that commotion?”
“You little devils!  You had better git on home now!”
The garbage could wait.  Alarmed, she hurtled toward the front door.  As she peered cautiously through the screen, she discovered a Negro woman who seemed to be standing guard at her gate.  Half a dozen little boys, whites and blacks, rocks in hand, were backing down, ready to bolt if just one of them would make the first move.
“What did he ever do to you?” The woman hollered.  “He’s a cripple-boy, not some monster like you littl’uns.”
“He’s blind and he’s stupid!” One of the white boys shot back.
“He don’t talk, neither,” one of the black boys piped up.
“You little cowards throw rocks at somebody who cain’t fight back, is thet it?”
In shock, Stella Jo realized they were talking about her Angel.  Angel was in the yard, curled up into a ball, his hands protecting his face.  The little boys had pinned him down with their missiles.  One of them made as if to fling another at him, but the woman shook one hammy fist and bellowed yet more loudly.
“You throw that, and I will sit on you boy!  You ever seen molasses on a col’ mornin’?  Thet’s what you’ll be.  And you white boys, you’ll be paste, I promise you!”
“My daddy--” one protested.
“Your white trash daddy and yo momma will be paste just like you.  I’ll sit on them, and they’ll have to send you away to the orphans’ home, boy!”
Tears sprang into their eyes as they hesitated, contemplating her threats.  Stella pushed open the screen door, rusty hinges shrieking like in some old horror movie, scattering them to the four winds.
Dabbing at her own teary eyes with her flour sack apron, she stumbled down the steps of her house and rushed to the gate.  At the sound of her approach, Ioletta Brown turned in her direction.  A muddy looking stream trickled down her cheeks.
“They was tormentin’ the boy, Miss Stella,” she said brokenly.
Stella pulled open the dilapidated, white-picket gate.  “I saw, Miss Ioletta.  You were so brave, what with their rocks and all.  Would you like to come in for iced tea and sugar cookies?”
“Wh-Why--” Ioletta stuttered in surprise.  “I-I think I would like that very much, thank you.”
They started toward the house, both of them veering toward Angel, huddled in the weeds, hands still over his eyes.
“He don’t look no worse for the wear, Miss Stella--I don’t think them boys coulda hit the broad side of a barn.”
“I think he’s fine, maybe a trifle in shock,” Stella said, bending over and swinging her little boy into her arms as if he weighed no more than a feather.  You could tell the original intent was for the boy to have been husky, but his useless legs dangled like the legs of a scarecrow with the stuffings all leaked out.  His milky blue eyes blinked open, shifting from his momma and then to Miss Ioletta.
“You all right, young man?” Ioletta asked.  “Least he’s not whimperin’ or nothin’.”
“He’ll be all right, God watches after him and his kind,” Stella said, gently tousling his brown, unkempt hair.
“Maybe some hot tea for the boy?” Ioletta suggested, as Stella one-handedly swept trash aside from the living room couch before setting Angel down.  She tucked a crocheted afghan around his ears.
“Hot tea is supposed to be good for shock,” she agreed.  “And the iced tea will be nice for the two of us.”
Once she had ministered to Angel, and the two women were settled at the kitchen table, tall glasses of tea in hand and sugar cookies at close range, Stella surveyed her once cozy domain with wide-eyed wonder.
“I am mortified!  It’s like I just woke up for the first time in years.  The place is piled high in trash!  How could any of my friends let this happen to me?”
Ioletta stared at the garbage with equally wide eyes.  Though one might not guess from her shapeless brown and white muumuu and her own extreme roundness, she always kept her house as neat as a pin.  Secretly, she wondered where the white woman’s lace doily work (which festooned her own place) could be.  She reached out and patted Stella on the back of one hand.
“It’s the shock, losing your husband and all, dear.  I can tell ya from doin’ the same myself and havin’ to take care of my boy.  Could be your friends don’t keep house any better, neither.”
Cookie crumbs sprayed suddenly from Stella, her hand covering her mouth too late.  The backs of her arms jiggled, as she continued to heave with laughter.
“I think you are right, Ioletta,” she said, carefully wiping crumbs into her napkin.  “They probably never noticed.  But what am I to do?”
“To do?  We’ll just pitch in!”
“You would be willing to help me?”
“Help?  What’s a little thing like that among sisters?”
Stella’s jaw dropped.  But after a moment’s consideration, she supposed she and Ioletta really were sisters, not in the flesh but certainly in the spirit.  Then there was her rearing a boy all by herself, too.  It was just that she had never before really thought about it.
“That Reverend Champion of yours, is he a good preacher?” She abruptly asked.
“Brother Cedric?  He’s a firecracker!”
“Well, you know that’s what I’ve always heard, and I suppose you could call our Reverend Hankins the same, if you leave out that part about the fire,” Stella said, laughing.  “But he does say we’re all the same at the foot of the cross.”
“That’s right!” Ioletta exclaimed, looking auspiciously over the rim of her glass.  “I heard that, and now ifn the firecrackers and the crackers could see their way to come together, maybe God would do somethin’ with the whole lot of us.”
“Why, Ioletta Brown!” Stella said.  “All these years of seeing you pass by on the street, I never would have dreamed!”
There was the hint of a smile from Ioletta.  “Well, I don’t guess us cackling like hens will clean this place none,” she remarked, modestly changing the subject.  “Don’t want to be all vines and no taters, you know.”
“Oh, the work can wait a little longer, I think.  Why don’t we sit a while, drinking tea, as sisters?” Stella said, patting Ioletta on the hand and then offering the plate of cookies, which were dwindling fast.  Neither one of these women had said no to a bite of food in quite a few years.
“And I’m not asking for nothin’ in return, Miss Stella.  I’m just saying that soze you know--I ain’t lookin’ for no maid’s wages.”
“Why, I think this is one of the finest Saturdays ever,” she said gratefully.
It was, too, even with Angel lying on a couch in the living room, an orange and brown afghan tucked up around his ears.  At the sound of laughter spilling from the kitchen, he smiled happily, though blood trickled from several of his knuckles and stone bruises were spreading across the back of both hands.  It had been a long time since he’d heard sounds of real joy in the house.



****



Chapter 3

A couple of years later, after Rev. Johnny left for greener pastures (driving a brand new ’59 blue-and-white Chevy Impala Coupe, 3-speed stick-shift on the column with overdrive, Brenda at his side), the church lost its fire.  Pretty much everyone lost hope of anything good ever happening again, until a handful of the faithful got the Pentecostal experience, which you knew was genuine because they pronounced it Pennycostal.  In fact, a few of that persuasion began to hope they might drop Baptist right out of the title and one day call it Flowers Avenue Pentecostal Church.  But they decided that might be a trifle divisive.  Anyhow, the old fire returned and some genuine miracles took place, prompting four or five of the ladies to take on Angel McIlhenny as a prayer burden one morning.  There was some real shouting for a few minutes, and prophesying, too.  They just knew Angel’s gnarled legs would straighten and he would walk like a normal boy.  After a while, they went on to praying for his voice.  He would speak with the tongues of angels, no more the mute little Angel.  Thousands, one of them declared loudly, would come to the river of salvation through the loosing of his tongue!
His mother, hanging back, looked on with wonder and hope but shook her head at the ladies who urged her to join them in the laying on of hands.  Her heart was ready to break.  What if it didn’t work?  Would it make Angel bitter?
After they finished, with no sign of his legs straightening out for them, though one of the older ladies kept plucking at them expectantly, someone remembered they should have prayed for his eyes.  Jesus had healed the blind as well as the lame and mute, hadn’t He?  But the moment was broken, the fervor was gone out of them, the Spirit no longer moved.
#
“Don’t they know I can talk, Momma?” Angel blurted over the usual Sunday dinner of Southern-fried chicken.  For the first time in weeks they were eating alone on the Lord’s Day, abandoned for Game 3 of the ’62 World Series between the Giants and the Yankees, because Stella’s television was always on the fritz.
“I guess they plumb forgot, Angel,” she said, shocked to hear his voice.  It had been so long since she’d heard it herself that it was like a miracle to hear it again.
“You’re not bitter, honey?” She asked, chewing on a drumstick.
“No, Momma.”
Later, she wished the ladies of the church could have been there to hear him speak that once, because his rare outbursts were about to become a lot rarer.  A lot of humming he would do, yes, but not speaking.  It began that day, and seldom ceased, various little half-musical tones emanating through pursed lips.  A few days after, though, was when he really started with the humming.  Crawling (his only exercise) out in what Stella Jo called the fallow front field and neighbors considered the weed-bestrewn yard, he chanced upon a handsome wooden mallet.  A few feet further along, he found an equally pristine chisel, its shiny planes not showing a lick of rust.  No one could figure how either one had come to lie in the yard like undiscovered treasure, but a new world was about to open for Angel.
He began with weathered old blocks of wood, discards from his father’s DIY house repairs.  A rusty vise nailed to the front porch railing was refurbished by a kindly elderly neighbor and moved to the lower steps, where Angel could easily reach his projects.  In a few short months, he had transformed the dozens of pieces of wood into a staggering array of angels, many of which surprisingly bore the likenesses of his neighbors, especially those of Flowers Avenue Baptist and what folk Ioletta brought over Sundays for dinner.  All the while he hummed his half-tunes, the nok-nok of mallet and chisel playing counterpoint.  Miserable, twisted body he might have, but from then on everyone knew that if ever there’d been a prime example of treasures hidden in earthen vessels, Angel was it.
His mother, when she first saw the miracles in wood issuing from her son’s hands, could be heard to exclaim, “Glory to God, you angels and all his saints!”  Long after she had passed from this earthly scene, it was a refrain Angel often heard while at his work.
When the wood was exhausted, he went right on with the stones in the yard, which were anchored in the dirt like they were the bones of the earth and hard enough to break the blades of the toughest commercial-grade mower, too.  Chancing upon them and seeing the angelic faces staring up through the weeds was likely to either startle a person or to inspire an epiphany.  Later on, in a year or so, when the veins of rock ran out, granite, marble, and sandstone blocks mysteriously began showing up, until a quarry seemed to have sprouted around the ramshackle house.  As the years rolled steadily past, with stone angels evidently falling from the heavens, folks in the neighborhood figured Angel had discovered his mission in life, or his calling, as some liked to say.  Certainly, he had found his talent and he wasn’t one to bury it and let it go to waste.



****



Part Two

Chapter 4

Rev. John Willimon, Flowers Avenue Baptist’s new Rev. Johnny, arriving close to ten years after the old Rev. Johnny’s departure, waited a few months before paying a call upon Alliance Baptist’s Rev. Cedric C. Champion.  Having heard the black minister began his days at the church in prayer, that was where he went, not knowing in the first place where Rev. Champion lived in the black section of town, which it was now called, since this was the period in between Colored or Negro and African American.  It goes without saying, it is unlikely he would have visited him in the black section of town even if he had known where the man lived.
The doors of the church were solid oak, with handsomely carved panels, the kind that easily bloodied one’s knuckles.  Having already knocked once, he glanced at his watch and prudently decided to wait a minute before knocking again.  The seconds seemed to drag by like an hour.  Were the few people driving down Flowers Avenue gawking?  He could almost feel their eyes burning holes into his back.
This time he pounded on the door with the fleshy part of his fist.  Drawing his coat tightly about his shoulders, he raised his collar against a sudden, biting wind.  It wasn’t quite six o’clock in the morning, an ungodly hour to be standing on a doorstep, even if it might be thought of as God’s doorstep, it being a church and all.
Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.  How appropriate, that verse coming to mind, he thought.  Was this what it was like for Jesus to stand outside the hearts of some men, calling to be let in, shivering in the wind and breaking His knuckles against the oak doors of a heart hardened against Him?  All the more appropriate, he thought, as he raised his fist to the door and pounded again, since the verse had been directed by Jesus to a church.
One of the doors swung open.  A man perhaps 6’2”, his shoulders broad enough to fill the empty door frame, looked down at him.
“Reverend Champion?” He asked, wondering if this was perhaps someone else.  From all the stories he had heard about the man, he expected someone much younger, not someone with silvery hair and a paunch.
“Do you need help, son, or are you just looking for spare change?” Rev. Champion asked, eyeing him closely, especially taking note of his bad haircut and scuffed shoes.
“I’m Reverend John Willimon,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.  He suddenly felt like an idiot, standing before the man, him thinking he was there for a handout.  He recognized the problem immediately.  Champion was dressed in suit and tie, while he had dressed in blue jeans and a check shirt, throwing on an old jacket just before coming from the house, when he saw it was cold outside.
“I’m sorry, son, what was that?”
Rev. Johnny noisily cleared his throat and then stuck out his right hand.  “Perhaps I’ve come at a poor time,” he said.  “I’m Reverend John Willimon, the new pastor of Flowers Avenue Baptist.”
He watched the eyebrows go up, saw the hesitation in the black minister’s eyes.
“Reverend Willimon.  Really?” He said, smiling at last and warmly accepting his handshake.
“Reverend Johnny--” he corrected him.  “At least that’s what most people around here call me.  I should have telephoned you.  It’s your prayer time, isn’t it?”
“Please, come in,” Rev. Champion said, stepping back to motion him inside.  Once he had closed the door, he gestured for him to follow.
“It might surprise you how many interruptions I have at this hour of the morning.  People see the light in my office window even with it way at the back side of the buildin’.”
“Your church is about the size of ours,” the white minister commented, as they walked through the sanctuary.
“The building, you mean?”
“Yes, the building,” he answered.  He looked for an attendance and offering board at the front of the church, like they used at Flowers Baptist, but saw none.  He didn’t need it, though, since anyone with eyes knew attendance was considerably higher here than at his own church.  One didn’t have to ask; you could see the crowds around the church doors on any given Sunday morning or evening and for Wednesday night services.
“We run about 600, most Sunday mornings,” Rev. Champion said.  “If you’re wondering.”
At least the man’s face didn’t communicate pride.  His voice was basso profundo, yet his demeanor matter-of-fact.  Willimon wondered what he could accomplish, reading out his sermons every Sunday, if he had a voice like Rev. Champion’s.  Almost, he thought he should maybe go home and start practicing on lowering his voice.  It wasn’t that his own voice was weak or oddly high; it was just that anything coming from such an instrument sounded impressive.
At sight of Rev. Champion’s bulging bookshelves, his eyes nearly popped from his head.  His face shone with open admiration as he took a seat in one of the chairs opposite the massive office desk.
“Amazing,” he managed to say.
“I like to think I know what I’m talking about, when I’m preaching,” Rev. Champion remarked.
It was difficult to tell if the minister from Flowers Baptist had heard him.  His eyes still scanned the stacks of shelves with their burdens of leather and hardbound books.
“It is a surprise to see you here,” Rev. Champion spoke bluntly.  “Is there a problem?”
“I-I’m sorry--a problem?” He asked, looking blankly at his counterpart.
“With one of my parishioners, perhaps?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that,” he answered, wondering vaguely what Rev. Champion would have said or done, if there were such a problem.  “I’ve been in the area a while, now, and thought I should introduce myself.”
Rev. Champion stared curiously.
“Us both working in the same field, the field of the Lord, I mean,” he tried to explain, nearly stuttering.  “I thought we might, you and I, cooperate, you know.”
Something flickered at the corners of Rev. Champion’s mouth.  Was it amusement?
“Of course, I’m sure I could learn a lot from you--you being so much older than me and all,” Rev. Johnny finished lamely, feeling more and more the idiot.
There it was again!  Only now, there was a definite twinkle in the man’s eyes.  Rev. Johnny rose hastily to his feet.
“No, no, sit down. Please,” Champion said, his voice a pleasant rumble.
Rev. Johnny collapsed into his chair.  Gratefully, it was a sturdy, high-backed leather chair and did not collapse with him.  Cheeks coloring, he gripped the chair arms tightly, the urge to run still upon him.  Not for the first time, he wondered why he had ever been called into the ministry and how it was that he had ended up in Calneh, especially on Flowers Avenue.  At 30 years-of-age he had come late to the ministry and often wondered if he should have come at all.
“As someone so much older in the ministry,” Rev. Champion said, “I believe I have some explaining to do.  Right about now, I suppose you feel like you’re sitting here hat in hand, as they say.”
“Pretty much.”
“Well then, that makes you an answer to prayer.”
“I’m sorry?” He said, his cheeks coloring once again.
Rev. Champion roared with laughter, a laughter that was clean and without rancor, a cousin to the exultant shouting he did from the church platform Sunday mornings and whenever else he preached, that is, when he was under the unction.  It was so completely unrestrained, the younger man quickly found himself smiling and laughing along with him.
“I-I’m sorry!” Rev. Champion said, wiping tears from his eyes.  “But how many times do you think I visited your Flowers Baptist to introduce myself to the new pastors?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, how many of them do you think welcomed me into their private offices and took me up on my offer of cooperation?”
Light seemed to dawn in Rev. Johnny’s eyes.  “Are you saying none?”
“Ten different pastors in less than twenty years over there, and my answer is zero, big fat goose egg, son--and before that, huh!  We won’t even talk about them.  None of them acknowledged we worked in the field of the Lord together--it was the same Lord, to them, I suppose, just different fields, me on my side of the street with my Negroes, and them on their side of the street with their white folks.”
“And never the twain shall meet,” Rev. Johnny muttered.
“If not for them, son, I would have been to see you right after you settled in.  I’d say I gave up one too soon.”
Rev. Johnny looked away, his gaze focused on the office windows and the gradually brightening daylight.  He wondered to himself if he’d unconsciously chosen visiting this early in the morning because he didn’t wish for anyone to see him at Alliance’s doors?
“I want things to be different,” he said, struggling against a sudden burst of emotion.  As awkward and foolish as he had felt introducing himself, he could only imagine what it had been like for Rev. Champion to approach Flowers Baptist’s former pastors--not just once, but ten times.
“It’s a good feelin’ to be an answer to prayer, isn’t it?” Rev. Champion asked.
“If you really think that’s what I am,” he answered stiffly.  “No, it is, aside from the embarrassment--sorry it’s so late in coming.”
Feeling uncomfortably close to babbling, he pushed himself to his feet. He didn’t honestly know how they and their respective churches might cooperate, but if the opportunity arose, he was willing.  If nothing else, he’d made his point.
“Well, now that we’ve met each other, I suppose I should let you return to your duties and I should attend to my own.”
“Reverend Johnny,” Champion said, rising to extend his hand over the desk.
“Reverend Champion,” he answered, receiving his handshake.  “You may as well call me John or Johnny.  That Reverend stuff tends to be a bit unwieldy between ministers, I think.”
“Call me Cedric,” Rev. Champion said in response, pronouncing his name with a long e.  “Let me see you out.”
They walked side-by-side through the sanctuary.  “Some of our church members seem to be quite close,” Rev. Johnny commented.
“A few, and there’d be more, frankly, if there hadn’t been a good deal of preachin’ against it by your predecessors,” Rev. Champion said.  “There’s no tellin’ what work the Holy Spirit might have done here, except for that and the fact no preacher ever seems willing to stay for long at Flowers, like it’s a bus stop on the way to some place else.”
Rev. Johnny nodded thoughtfully, and the two shook hands again at the church’s oak doors.
“If there’s ever anything you would like to borrow from my theological collection, let me know, Johnny.”
“Thank you, that would mean a lot to me, Cedric.  And you let me know if there’s anything I can do for you, brother.”
Cedric watched as Johnny descended the church stairs and crossed to the other side of Flowers Avenue.  He shook his head to himself as he closed the door and made his way back to his office.  It seemed like white men couldn’t or wouldn’t pronounce his name correctly.  They all wanted to say it with a short e, make him into an Anglo-Saxon, he guessed.
He picked up his Bible and flipped it open at random, as he sat down at his desk.  The first verse his eyes fell upon was, Who hath despised the day of small things?
“Not me, Lord,” he said, acknowledging to himself that meeting with the new pastor of Flowers Baptist might seem like a small thing to a lot of observers.  He prayed it was a step in the right direction.  Calneh certainly needed healing.  The churches on Flowers Avenue and the people on both sides of the street would be a good place to start.
“Brother,” the white minister had called him, as they said their goodbyes.  That was a good start, too.  Brother.  One simple, two-syllable word.  It surprised him, how such a seemingly minor utterance, totally without affectation, made him feel.  No other white minister, at least not in the South, had ever called him Brother and sounded like he meant it.  He smiled, as he resumed his prayers, and sensed God smiling with him.  There was no other explanation he could think of for the joy he felt flooding the room.



****



Chapter 5

Calneh Police Beat
March 16, 1969.  A male suspect was apprehended at about 1:30 a.m. after he crashed his car through the fence of a residence located at 1003 S. Flowers and allegedly broke into the house and assaulted the occupants.  19-yr-old Mark John Davies was booked into City Jail and awaits arraignment on reckless driving, breaking and entering, assault, and drug charges. Davies is a recent returnee from a tour of duty in Vietnam with the Army.

The intersection of Flowers Ave. and S. Bougainvillea was not fashionable enough for most newspapermen to disturb their sleep, especially not at 1:30 on a Sunday morning.  What with the riots of ’68 so fresh on everyone’s minds, it was a miracle the police showed their faces at 1003 Flowers, (not S. Flowers, as the Calneh Southerner News had it).  Their appearance on the scene, and subsequent actions, skated sufficiently closely to disaster that the night’s story might well have appeared, instead, in magazines like Time and Newsweek as the trigger to Calneh’s second series of riots since Rev. King’s assassination.
The noise of screeching tires and breaking glass brought Ioletta Brown from a sound sleep, the first such sleep she had known since recovering from a lung condition brought on by a winter cold that dragged on and dragged on, until she despaired of life itself.  The crash had to be loud, to cut through the noise of her thunderous snores.  To her own way of thinking, she bolted upright from bed.  But to most anyone else watching it would have looked more like one of those Marlin Perkins’ films where some poor creature desperately struggles to extricate itself from quicksand.  The living room couch (her bed for the last few years on account of her legs refusing to carry her up the steep, narrow stairs to her own bedroom on the second floor of her shotgun-style house), groaned pitiably under her 400 pounds, the heart long gone out of its springs.
“Lord-a mercy,” she muttered.  “What now?”  With heroic effort, she heaved herself to her feet and for once did not find herself sinking back, which would have required yet another, more heroic effort to rise.  Flannel nightgown gathered around her to ward off the night chill, she trundled her way in the dark to a side window and hunkered over for a good view of the street.
“Why, it looks like some drunken fool has driven into Stella’s yard!” She exclaimed, squinting hard.  It was difficult to tell, with Stella’s place several houses down the block, and light shining only from the corner streetlamp next to Flowers Baptist.
Without warning, the living room light clicked on.  She was startled to find herself staring at her own reflection.  Lamarr, her son, had stumbled his way down from the upstairs bedroom in the dark, and peered questioningly at her.
“What’s the matter, Momma?”
“Turn that light out, boy!” She shot back.  “I cain’t see what’s happenin’!”
Instead of turning the light off, Lamarr went to the window and gave it one mighty pull.  Paint split all the way up the frame and putty crumbled to the floor, but the window, unopened for perhaps decades, did not budge.  His only other reward was that the painted handle, once polished brass, came free in his hand.  Unfazed, Lamarr pressed his forehead against a glass pane.
“Hard tellin’, from here,” he mumbled, buttoning his jeans.  “Looks like somebody probably done crashed into Stella’s house, Momma.”
“Oh God, oh God, no, help us Jesus!” She wailed.  “What’s the world comin’ to?  Do ya mean it?”
“Don’t worry, Momma,” he said.  “I’ll go see what’s happenin’.”
“Would you?” She pleaded, with one hand to her heaving bosom.  “I-I-I believe I feel faint.”
“You need help, Momma?” He asked, taking her elbow to steer her back to the couch.
She slapped his hand away.  “No, no, boy,” she said.  “You go see about Stella Jo and that boy of hers.”
“I’ll do that, but you sit yourself down first.”
She allowed him to help her to her loveseat, the only other chair in the house, besides the couch, generously wide enough to accommodate her girth.  Once all the excitement died down, she’d be on her feet to see personally to Stella and her troubles.
“Git on with you boy, and God protect you,” she said gratefully.  “Lord deliver us all.”
Lamarr left her side.  Shirtless and shoeless, muscles rippling, he ran with the grace of a panther toward Stella’s.  He only wished he had his service issue .45 auto in hand.  But this was not Vietnam, and he wasn’t supposed to need a gun at home in his own neighborhood.
#
Stella Jo, asleep in her first floor back bedroom, slept the sleep of the righteous, especially of those righteous who knew how to brew a pot of strong chamomile-valerian root-passion flower tea.  No drunk’s careering through her fence and into the porch could wake her.
“Momma!”
While a car crashing into her front porch had not wakened her, Angel’s voice cut like a knife through her righteous slumber, potent herbal tea notwithstanding.  Was the world coming to an end?  The whole place seemed to be rattling and shaking!  Clutching a blanket around her shoulders, she heaved herself from bed, her mother-heart answering the distress call of her child.  Like Ioletta a few houses down the block, Angel always slept on the living room sofa, which Stella had folded down for him every night for close to a dozen years.  The kitchen was adjacent to the back bedroom, and she had to pass through it and a hallway to reach the living room.  On the way, she flipped on the lights and snatched her favorite 12-inch iron skillet from the gas stovetop, whose best Christian use was frying chicken for neighbors who dropped in Sundays from either side of the street.
Armed with her weapon, which in the hands of a 220-pound female would do formidable damage upon the head of any man fool enough to challenge her, she rushed into the living room.  A single light bulb in the floor lamp beside the sofa was on, since Angel was in the habit of never sleeping in complete darkness.  He didn’t look up as his mother arrived, his milky-blue eyes aimed instead in the general direction of the front door.
“God in heaven!” She cried, as a shadowy form launched itself at her door.  Glass panes cracked at the impact and the door’s wood frame shrieked.
The shadow withdrew momentarily in preparation for another headlong rush.  This time, as shoulder met door, there was a loud crash accompanied by splitting wood.  The door burst inwards and a man stumbled over the threshold.  He shook his close-cropped head as if to recover himself, stood to his full height and glanced around, seemingly surprised at having achieved his goal.  His blue eyes swiftly took in Angel huddled on the couch and Stella draped in her blanket, skillet in hand.
He cursed softly, and Stella felt her heart freeze in her chest as his eyes met hers.  In the background, Angel hummed one of his tunes, which she immediately recognized as Amazing Grace.  At that moment, Lamarr burst upon the scene like an avenging angel.  The intruder, yanking a knife from his belt, turned upon the newcomer with a curse, glanced up at the towering black figure, and charged madly.
For Lamarr, instantly recognizing the blade as a combat knife, one edge sharp, curving steel, the other deeply grooved and serrated, time seemed to have stopped in its flow.  Even as eye, hand, and body responded perfectly, like well-oiled machinery instead of flesh and blood, the thought that he was about to die flashed through his mind.
Oh Jesus God, am I gonna die here on my own street, after a year in Nam?
No more than a distance of three or four feet had separated them from each other, but somehow he slipped aside and answered with ferocity of his own, the cool, uncalculating kind learned through countless hours of practice until it is automatic reflex.  Snatching at wrist and shoulder, he used the man’s own impetus to swing them both around and to bodily throw him against a wall.  With a sickening crunch, the assailant slid to the floor, knocked cold.
It was over that quickly.  Lamarr saw time resume its flow, and moved to confirm whether the man was really out for the count.  Blood ran from a swelling the size of a tennis ball over one eye, and white bones gleamed through the flesh of his wrist, which had evidently shattered, as it and the knife attempted oneness with a 2x4 wall stud.  To be safe, Lamarr yanked the knife from the wall and hefted it.  He had been right; he had seen all of these knives he would ever want to see in Vietnam.
Stella dropped both her skillet and her blanket, and grabbed at her chest.  Her breath came in short gasps.
“I-I-I-ah--”
Lamarr was instantly at her side, helping her to lower herself to the couch.  Knife in hand, he picked up her blanket and settled it around her shoulders.
“Everything’s all right, now, Miss Stella,” he said reassuringly.  “It’s me, Lamarr, don’t you worry.”  Patting Angel on the knee, he said, “It’s all right, isn’t it, bro?  You’re fine too, ain’t you?”
Staring up with milky-blue eyes, Angel hummed, still Amazing Grace, which Lamarr knew from his childhood days at Rev. Champion’s Alliance Baptist Church.
Down on his knees before Stella and Angel, knife still in one hand for safekeeping, that was when two of Calneh’s finest appeared on the scene.  Intent on Stella and Angel, Lamarr didn’t turn, knowing there would be other neighbors coming to the scene to satisfy their curiosity.
“Put down the knife and step away from the woman, boy.”
A chill ran down Lamarr’s spine as he heard a gun cocked.  To their credit, the boys in blue had not used the n-word, but Lamarr knew he was in trouble.
“It ain’t what ya think,” he said, still on his knees.  “This woman needs medical attention right now.”
“Drop the knife and step away,” the command came again.  “Now!”
He dropped the knife, which hit the wood floor butt first with an awful, dead-sounding thud.  Slowly, he turned and rose to his full height, putting his hands up at the same time.  Like his momma, Lamarr was big.  Unlike his momma, his features were fine and handsome, one of those beautiful miracles of creation that the geneticists think they understand but only God really does, or perhaps the nameless Classical Greek sculptors or someone like Michelangelo.  His muscles gleamed like burnished hardwood in the lamplight.
But all the cops saw was a monster who’d broken into a white woman’s home and would have raped and killed her if they hadn’t arrived on the scene in the nick of time.  One cop, a redhead nicknamed Irish (though his ancestors had never been south of Denmark before immigrating to the New World), followed Lamarr with his gun.  The other cop, new to the force and younger than his partner by a dozen years, fumbled with his baton, struggling at the same time to pull his sidearm out of its holster.
“Tell ’em, Miss Stella.  Tell ’em I wasn’t doin’ nothin’ wrong.”
Stella Jo was no help at all, her every breath interrupted by hiccups.  Her eyes darted wildly between the cops and Lamarr and Angel, her hand still clutching her chest.
From the corner of the room, there was a loud groan.
“Who’s that?”  Irish demanded excitedly.  “Check it out, Billy, see if he’s gone and killed somebody!”
Like an idiot, Billy would have walked in front of Irish, between him and Lamarr, but Irish stopped him with a curse.
“Go around behind me!”
Burning with shame, Billy gingerly made his way behind Irish and past the end of the couch, where he saw a man lying in a crumpled heap.  He bent over to take a closer look.
“He’ll live, I guess, but it don’t look too good,” Billy said.  “Looks like he’d be the woman’s son.”
Lamarr’s blood ran cold.  He hadn’t the luxury of examining the assailant closely as he flew past him, knife intent on taking his life, but as they say, the situation seemed ever more to be headed south.
“On your knees!” Irish shouted, brandishing his gun.
Lamarr’s eyes darted between the two cops, Billy moving to take up a position at his back, while Irish inched closer, aiming at his face.  Could he somehow bolt for the door and actually make it?  Or would a stray bullet strike Stella or Angel in all the excitement?
“Drop to your knees, I said, you murderin’--”
The rest of what the cop said was irrelevant, curses screamed in the heat of the moment, adrenaline running high.  But still, Lamarr did not budge.  He had decided that if he was to die, and he believed he was, he would rather it be standing up like a man, not like some animal with a gun behind its ear.
“I’ll blow your brains out!” Irish screamed.  Behind Lamarr but separated by the couch where Stella and Angel sat, Billy was no less agitated, his gun jerking in his hand like the end of a fishing pole teased by a big catfish.
“Look fellas, he broke into the house,” Lamarr said, indicating the unconscious man in the corner.  “I stopped him.  I’m a M.P. myself and I ain’t droppin’ for you or nobody else--and you’d better be calling the ambulance for Miz McIlhenny here.”
There were footsteps on the porch.  Irish, conscious of the street he was on and last year’s riots, which had almost spilled over into the white sections of town, expected curious neighbors, maybe even a few angry bystanders.
“Stay out!” He shouted, risking one quick glance behind him and edging around to keep the open doorway within his view and Lamarr under his gun.
“Stay out, folks,” a raspy but commanding voice said from the porch.  “Everything’s under control.”
“It don’t look like nothin’s under no control ta me,” retorted a different voice.
“For the last time, giddown!” Irish screamed.
First tossing away a glowing cigarette butt, the owner of the raspy voice entered, a silvery-haired man taller even than Lamarr, but thin as a rake, emphasized all the more by his rumpled gray suit and the black tie hanging loosely from the unbuttoned collar of his white shirt.  He flashed his badge and walked straight to Lamarr, completely ignoring Irish and Billy.
“Semper fi, Sarge,” he said.
“Captain Odoms,” Lamarr answered weakly.  Clarence “Chance” Odoms lived only four or five houses further down the street from Lamarr and his mother, but in all the years he’d known him, the man had never once said hello to him, not even as they walked to church on Sundays, with the Browns headed to Alliance Baptist on the one side of the street and the Odoms clan on their way to Flowers Baptist on the other.  Some children were threatened with the bogeyman by their parents if they misbehaved.  On Flowers Avenue, parents on both sides threatened their children with a visit from Captain Odoms, old bloody bones himself, whose face was the image of an eagle with steely gray eyes.  It didn’t help that, once in a while, two guns could be seen sticking from inside his ill-fitting suit jacket.
“What’s the situation, Lamar?”  He asked.  Not waiting for an answer, he knelt beside Stella and took her wrist.  Her pulse raced, her eyes wild.
“There was a commotion over here, sir, soze I ran over to check it out.  The fella over there in the corner, he done broke the door down before I showed up.  That’s his combat knife layin’ on the floor there.”
“And like a good soldier, you took care of the matter,” he said.  He picked up the phone from the end table and dialed for an ambulance.  To Lamarr, he added, “Excellent, excellent, put your hands down, why don’t you, son?”
Irish, his eyes flashing angrily, was ready to chew nails.  “What the hell are you doin’, Odoms?” He demanded, waving his gun threateningly.
Lamarr vacillated between letting his hands down completely or only halfway.  Odoms didn’t make eye contact with either of the cops, instead speaking swift instructions for an ambulance to rush to 1003 Flowers Street, near the intersection of S. Bougainvillea.
“We told you to drop to your knees, boy!”  Billy shouted at Lamarr, his voice cracking in mid-sentence.
“You’d better have your young partner here put his gun away,” Odoms said to Irish, as he replaced the phone in its cradle.  To Stella, he said, “An ambulance will be here for you shortly.  Try your best to calm down.”
Pulling the blanket from Angel, who released it without protest, Odoms tucked it around Stella’s legs and told her to lie down as much as she could on the couch.  Satisfied that for the moment he had done his best, he turned his full attention to Irish.
“This is my street, boys, and I know Lamarr here.  He’s a good boy, and a better neighbor.  Fact is, he’s a dadgummed war hero just back from Vietnam with a chest full of medals.  This other fellow in the corner, I’d say he was doing just as Lamarr here said he was.  Don’t you think it’s about time you called a’ ambulance for him and were seeing to your duties elsewhere?”
“He wouldn’t do as he was told,” Irish said.  “Resisted my direct orders.”
“I dunno,” Odoms said, gravely shaking his head, “considering the circumstances, you interfering with a highly trained military policeman giving aid to a woman having a heart attack, and him having just saved her life and the life of her crippled son, that might not look so good down at your precinct or in the newspapers tomorrow.”
At last, Irish wavered.  Deflating suddenly, he shoved his gun back into its holster.  Irish wasn’t close enough to see the triumph in Chance’s hooded eyes, but Lamarr was.
“Go ahead and call it in on the radio,” Irish said to Billy, who was fumbling to put his gun away.  “We’ll wait outside.”
“Do you think Miss Stella will be all right?” Lamarr asked.  Neighbors from both sides of the street began to stream in and gather around, as curious to see Lamarr and Chance Odoms in conversation as they were to see the busted front door and a man lying unconscious in the corner of the room.
“I think you may be hyperventilating,” Odoms rasped, leaning over and speaking quietly to Stella, who could do no more than hiccup violently.  “If you could try to slow your breathing--
“You folks will have to leave--” he ordered, turning abruptly and speaking to the gathering crowd.  “Too much excitement in this house for one night.”
But as they began to file out, he ordered, “Someone go to the kitchen and see if you can’t find us a paper bag--I know you all know where the kitchen is.”
A few minutes later, Ioletta poked her head in at the doorway.  “Lamarr, is everything all right?”  Her eyes widened as she took in the destruction and spied Stella wheezing into a brown paper sack.
“C’mon in, Miz Brown,” Odoms said.  “Your son here has everything in hand, but I s’pose you’ll be wanting to spend the night to watch after Angel, because of Miz McIlhenny having to go to the hospital?”
“Thet’d be fine,” she said.  The floorboards groaned wearily as she walked in and sat beside Angel.  Pulling him close in a reassuring if smothering embrace, she stared, her eyes widening further as the emergency personnel arrived and placed her friend on a gurney.  Right behind them the police ambulance arrived, and men carried out the unconscious assailant on another gurney.
Chance Odoms and Lamarr had gone out to Stella’s shed to hunt up a tarp to cover the front door, until something could be done about it in the morning, which is why they didn’t witness Ioletta’s shocked expression.
“Why, dear Jesus!” She cried.  “Except for the knot on the boy’s head, he looks jist like you, Angel.”
He did, too, and it wasn’t because white folks all look the same to certain other folks.  Angel smiled at Ioletta, happy to have her nearby.  He was humming, but it was no longer Amazing Grace.  Now it was In the Garden.
“That’s right, honey,” she said, unconsciously humming along with him.
“Lamarr,” he murmured.  But in her agitation she didn’t hear him, and even if she had she wouldn’t have believed her ears.  As far as she was concerned, Stella’s stories all these years, about the boy being able to talk, were just one of those motherly things made up to reassure herself.
Odoms had found a pair of flashlights in the house.  With them, he and Lamarr illuminated the interior of the shed, which, if it weren’t overflowing with years of accumulated junk, might have served as a single-car garage.
“Sorry about calling you boy earlier, son,” Odoms remarked matter-of-factly.  With long practice, he one-handedly extracted a filterless Camel cigarette from its cellophane package and lit up, using his battered USMC lighter.
Lamarr was silent, as he cautiously worked his way through a welter of long disused, decrepit shop tools and of rusted, worn out garden implements and a pair of equally rusty lawn mowers.  Toward the back wall were dilapidated shelves sagging under the weight of aging lumber, much of it good, much of it scrap.  The few times he’d been in this shed in years past, he’d always marveled how Ol’ Leonard could ever find anything in it unless maybe it was by accident.  How white folks could be this messy, he didn’t know.
In spite of the mowers and rakes and a hoe or two and a number of mysterious tools whose purpose he couldn’t guess, the McIlhenny yard was never properly maintained; the nearest it ever came to that exalted state was during the growing season, when Stella let it out to everyone in the neighborhood who wanted to raise a few vegetables.  It gave the place an odd feel, with kale and corn or beets and tomatoes sprouting among standing or toppled statues, since the artist saw no problem working on the blocks of stone from any or all angles.  “Angel’s fallen angels,” the neighborhood wags were fond of calling them.
“You didn’t have to tell ’em that stuff about me winning a bunch of medals over in Nam,” he remarked quietly.
“You received some, didn’t you?” He asked around the cigarette.
“Yeah, doin’ what anybody woulda.  Pulled a few of our boys out of a booby-trapped bar.  Hardly something to write home about.”
Odoms shrugged his shoulders.  “Could’ve been real dicey tonight, if the boys in blue had insisted on taking you in.  That’s why I had to come in and take control like I did.”
“I was wonderin’ about that semper fi business,” Lamarr muttered.
“It’s always the Marines that come in to save the day, isn’t it?”
Lamarr grunted, continuing to rummage through the shelves though his heart was not in it.  He had nearly been killed twice this night, and he had no desire to puncture his hand on a rusty nail and end his life with a case of lockjaw.
“Think we’ll win that war over there?”  Odoms asked.
“We-ell,” Lamarr said, his hesitation clearly communicating his doubts.
“Too bad, all those boys…”  Odoms sighed deeply and exhaled a stream of smoke.  “Hear you’ll be leaving for Korea next and there’s Officer Candidate School in the works.”
“That’s the plan,” Lamarr said, finally putting his hand on a tarp.  It astonished him, how much this man knew about him, when they had never spoken to each other before this night.
“Just as well,” Odoms muttered.  “The way things are around here and all.”
“I s’pose that’s true, sir.”
“You are a hero, though,” Odoms said, replacing the lock on the shed door.  “You couldn’t know what you’d face here tonight any more than what you faced in that bar in Saigon.”
Lamarr didn’t answer.  Together they walked back to the front of the house, carrying the tarp between them.  Even after the demolition boys found an unexploded bomb in the wreckage of the Saigon bar, he hadn’t felt like a hero, and he didn’t feel like a hero tonight, either.  He just felt grateful to be alive at all.



****



Chapter 6

In spite of his mother’s disapproval, Lamarr took Sunday off from services at Rev. Champion’s church and instead commenced to fixing the McIlhenny’s front door.  Against Ioletta’s vigorous protests at his breaking the Sabbath, he reminded her that Saturday was the Sabbath, not Sunday, which was the Lord’s Day, and that they were Baptists, not Seventh Day Adventists.
“Hmmph.  You have an answer for everything, don’t you, boy?”  To Ioletta, arguments like that were just so much smart-alecky talk dishonoring to the Lord.
“Now Momma,” he said, mounting a defense, “didn’t the Lord Jesus hisself say something about if a’ ox falls into a ditch on the Sabbath, it’s okay to haul it out?”
Her upper lip rose to reveal the split between her two front teeth, as she scrunched her face in thought.  “That sorta sounds right--”
Her face brightened suddenly.  “But this ain’t no ox!”
Unimpressed, he shook his head sternly.  “You want your best friend to go without a door so any fool can walk in.”
He could see she was wavering.
“If you put it that way...”
“Just sayin’,” he said, clamping down on a smile.
“Well, I know you’ll be making a lotta noise over here,” she said, turning to survey the scene, trying to figure out how she could help with a little advice.  His saw horses stood by, with hammers and a hand saw, a square, level, metal tape measure, crowbar, a carpenter’s pencil, and a sack of nails neatly laid out on the porch.
“What with all the poundin’ you’ll be doing, you’ll be disturbin’ Reverend Johnny’s service next door.  I hear he don’t preach none too loud.  You might have them white folks mad at you.”
“Maybe,” he said, shrugging, resigned to the fact that carpentry wasn’t known for being quiet like, say--ironing shirts.
“Maybe you could figure out some way to pound them nails silent like.”
He scratched his head, and frowned.  “Well...”
“I know--you could maybe do some of the work inside instead of out here on the porch,” she suggested.  “That would help.  Keep it down to a whisper.”
“All right.”
“Ahh,” she said, a victorious gleam lighting her eyes.  “You’ll have to be comin’ to church, boy.  You ain’t no door to replace that old broken one, and you cain’t buy one on a Sabbath on account of the stores being closed.”
“We-ell--” he said, scratching his nose and looking at her sideways, allowing her a moment of triumph.  “I do have a door.  Miss Stella’s Ol’ Leonard must’ve thought about replacing the doors before he passed on, ’cause I found two out in the shed this morning--a regular door and a screen door.  Real nice ones still in the boxes.”
“Hmmph.”
He smiled, as she retreated into the house.  When he returned from the shed several minutes later with a boxed door in his hands, she was coming back out with Angel, who was armed with elbow crutches and successfully installed in his leg braces.
“We’ll be off, now,” she announced, giving the steps a determined look.
Envisioning his mother and Angel tumbling down the steps as they tried to negotiate their way off of the porch together, Lamarr hurriedly set the door on the ground and lent a hand.  Angel tended to wander greatly from side to side in his rare perambulations afoot, and so Ioletta kept one fist bunched into his shirt collar to guide him, which if he’d been wearing a tie would likely have choked him to death.  But since she hadn’t been able to find one that went properly with red plaid, he was safe.
“You taking him to his own church?” Lamarr asked.
“Nope,” she said, lifting her chin defiantly.  “He’ll be likin’ the music and preachin’ at Brother Champion’s this morning.  ’Bout time he found out what church is really like--ain’t thet so, Angel honey?”
Angel responded with a hummed tune, this time one of his own composition.  At least neither Ioletta nor Lamarr recognized it from their own vast repertoire of hymns and choruses learned at Alliance Baptist.  That did not mean they actually believed he had replied to Ioletta’s query, as nice as it was to think he might.
“See?  He agrees!”  Ioletta exclaimed.
Lamarr watched apprehensively as his mother and Angel wove their way toward the front gate.  The path of red hardpan, lined every few yards on either side with Angel’s statues, did not afford them much leeway, and every once in a while Lamarr heard the clash of metal on stone, as art collided with braces or crutches.  Ioletta trailed behind, as if in tow, like a woman pulled along by a large dog.
“Mind how you pull that ox out of the ditch, boy,” she called to Lamarr from the gate.
“Mindin’, Momma,” Lamarr called back.  “And you mind how you cross the street.  I don’t want to be pullin’ you out of no ditch.”
“Oh, you’re a cruel son, turning the words of the Lord against your own mother,” she retorted.  “Almost like you think you have a sense of humor.”
One hand in Angel’s shirt collar, Ioletta waved with the other and smiled as if she were departing on a long voyage.  Angel tugged and she followed in his wake, crossing Flowers Avenue, with Lamarr watching until they were safely on the opposite shore.
He had slid the door out of its box and stood it next to the damaged doorway, when out of the corner of one eye he caught sight of Chance Odoms and his wife and daughter.  Attired in their Sunday best, the women in their white hats and clutching white purses, they were obviously strolling to Rev. Johnny’s church.
Lamarr’s perfunctory wave turned Chance unexpectedly in at the gate, stranding the women on the sidewalk.  Cecily, heiress thankfully of her mother’s good looks, with auburn hair and green eyes, shifted her hands over her purse for a discreet, fluttery wave at Lamarr, while Mrs. Odoms stood coolly by, looking everywhere but in his direction.
“Good morning,” Chance said.
“Good morning, Captain Odoms.”
Chance Odoms’ steely gaze quickly took in the door and the tools laid out in neat array.  “Looks to me like you could use yourself a hand, Lamarr,” he said, at the same time peeling off his suit coat to throw it over the porch rail.
“Sir, really,” Lamarr started to protest.  Odoms was already loping back to his wife and daughter.
If there was an argument from Mrs. Odoms, Lamarr couldn’t hear it.  Both women resumed their walk to the church, while Chance strode purposefully to the porch.  Lamarr noticed he packed only one gun today, leastwise that he could see, probably on account of it being the Lord’s Day.  A sudden breeze whipped his thin black tie over the webbed shoulder holster.  Did the man ever go outside without a gun?
“I thought those boxes might be doors,” Odoms said.  “Hard to tell in the dark, last night.”
“Yessir.”
“What’s your opinion on the cracked pane?”
Lamarr glanced at the door, glad that at least three of its four frosted panes were intact.  “I just figured to put a piece of cardboard in it until I could replace it.”
“How about the casing?”
“I looked at that, too, sir,” Lamarr admitted, anticipating what he thought the other man might suggest.
“And what was your conclusion?”
He stretched his metal tape measure over the door.  “It’s like Miss Stella always says--her Leonard liked to do things on the cheap.”
“Sounds right to me,” Odoms said, with a snort.
“I guess he bought some damaged goods and figured he would re-do it all hisself, sir.”
“But no man knows the day or the hour,” Odoms intoned solemnly.  “Life is but a vapor--”
“That’s good preachin’, sir.”
“On Sunday, no less.  And Anna Lee thought I would miss out at Reverend Johnny’s this morning.”
“It wasn’t that good of preachin’, sir,” Lamarr said.
“By that, I’d say you’ve never heard Reverend Johnny’s preaching,” Odoms said, guffawing along with Lamarr.  The older man seemed invigorated.  His eyes performed another quick inventory of Lamarr’s tools.
“No circular saw?” He asked.
“Oh, mine was stolen some time ago, and Mr. McIlhenny’s is a piece of rusted trash.”
“What about finishing nails, are they in the sack, too?”
“Well, sir, I meant to make do.”
“Let’s see, we’ll need a nail punch and a hand plane, maybe a wood chisel would be nice, too.  Hafta bring the miter box, don’t want to forget that,” Odoms said, stroking his clean-shaven chin.
“Lockset?” He suddenly thought to ask.
“There’s a usable one in the shed, sir.”
“I’ll be back shortly.”
Lamarr’s eyes widened as Odoms turned and leapt from the porch.  Moments later he was through the gate and almost running toward his own house, perhaps restrained only by the knowledge that this was Sunday and would look inappropriate to those few stragglers still on the way to church.  Lamarr had almost expected to see him hurdle the fence.
He checked his watch before picking up his crowbar and a wood block.  He wasn’t about to wait for Odoms to return.  He just hoped the man did not try to tell him how to do everything, play Mister Charlie.  The doorframe, badly splintered the night before, had to be removed.  One thing for sure, though, that circular saw would make a lot more noise than his handsaw.
#
Lamarr smiled as he toted up what he needed from the shed.  There was no worry about having to wait until tomorrow to buy either lumber or wood molding from the local lumber yard.  Outside, Chance Odoms pulled up in his blue Chrysler, parked behind Stella’s two-tone, salmon-on-creme colored Ford Galaxie, and began to unload the trunk.
“I’m back, Lamarr,” Odoms announced.
“Yessir,” he said, gingerly tossing molding through the door.
Odoms bent over to pick up the molding and several other pieces like it.  “Lamarr,” he said, “you ever tire of all that sir business?”
“Yessir, I s’pose I do, sir.  Any more questions, sir?”
Both men laughed.  With two pairs of hands, the repair of the door went swiftly.  With a minimum of cussing, too, it being Sunday, and McIlhenny’s next door to the church.  Having endured a near-record cold snap in Calneh the previous week, Lamarr had happily stripped to the waist under a warm sun, while Chance Odoms loosened only his tie, neglecting even to roll up his sleeves.  Lamarr wouldn’t have been surprised if he had decided to work in his suit coat.  A drive up and down the streets of Calneh any given Sunday revealed white men mowing their lawns or working under the open hoods of their cars in their Sunday-go-to-meetin’ best.  ’Course, if you were black, you better not be driving up and down white folks’ streets to see what they were doin’.
Chance Odoms had not troubled himself to remove his holster and gun.  Rumor had it that he never removed it in the shower, either, or when he went to bed, though for the straight dope, one would have had to ask his wife, Anna Lee.  He watched keenly as Lamarr opened and closed the door.  A shave with the hand plane here and there took out the last of the squeaks.
“Lamarr, you would have made a fine carpenter.  It’s the devil, putting a door in right.”
“Let’s see, sir,” he answered, “these are Sergeant Lamarr’s choices, making it as an officer in the Army or tryin’ for the whites-only carpenters union in Calneh.  What would you choose for him?”
“There’s the union for black carpenters,” he suggested helpfully.
“Lower pay and benefits.  Fewer opportunities.”
“Your mother ever tell you how you should learn to take a compliment instead of turning it into an argument?”
“You ever try to give my mother a compliment?”
“The way I hear it, your mother likes compliments on her cookin’, especially on her okra and collard greens.”
Lamarr guffawed.  For a white man, Odoms was pretty quick with an answer.  He knew for a fact that before last night, his mother and Odoms had never spoken with one another.  The man must have eyes and ears everywhere.  Which made sense for a detective, especially the city’s top homicide cop.
“You find that amusing?” Odoms said, crinkling an eyebrow at him.
“Aw, that don’t count,” Lamarr said.  “She always turns it around and says how the Lord done it anyhow.”
Both men laughed, and anyone listening would have thought they were old friends.  Odoms, laughing as hard as he remembered having ever laughed in his whole life, pressed one hand against a stitch in his side.
“Praise the Lord, He sure knows how to cook greens just right.”
“Okrie, too,” Lamarr said.
“And pies!” Odoms hooted.  “The Lord’s good at bakin’ them pies, ’specially sweet potato pies.”
“You boys wouldn’t be making fun where you shouldn’t be, especially not on the Lord’s Day, would you?”
Color drained from the detective’s face.  He turned and found Anna Lee staring up from the foot of the stairs, as pretty as a picture but stern and humorless.  He noticed her white, slingback pumps had picked up a fine coat of dust from her walk up the pathway.  Beyond her, at the gate, their daughter stood waiting.
“Hello, Daddy,” Cecily called demurely.  “Hello, Lamarr.  A lovely Sunday to you.”
Taking in Mrs. Odoms’ finely-penciled arched eyebrows, Lamarr confined himself to a gentlemanly smile.  As she continued looking askance at him, he thought it wise to pull on his undershirt.  The warm Alabama sun, beating down ever more hotly throughout the morning, gave way to icicles.
“Will you be coming home for dinner shortly?” She asked her husband.  “Or will you and your friend, Mister Brown, be continuing your work here?”
Chance glanced at Lamarr, who, like any wise man in those kinds of moments, had beaten a hasty retreat and was now making a show of examining the damage to the McIlhenny porch.  No help there.
“I believe Mr. Brown and I have considerable more work before us, my dear,” he said.  He would have suggested she bring him and Lamarr a few pieces of chicken and some of her prizewinning pecan pie later on but, considering the piercing green of her eyes, he calculated the chances of it happening as slim to none.  Good homicide cops and good Marines know when to choose their battles.
“Dinner will be left in the oven for you,” Anna Lee told him.  What she did not say was that it would be as tough as shoe leather by the time he came home.
Already hungry at the mere mention of dinner, he sighed as she carefully made her way down the path in her white pumps.  Waiting for her mother, Cecily waved encouragement to her father.  Across the street, veering back and forth like a drunken sailor, Angel had Ioletta in tow.  If they were lucky, they would all meet as Anna Lee reached the gate.
Cecily held the gate open for her mother, then waited for Angel and Ioletta.
“I understand you make wonderful greens, Miz Brown, and pies, too,” Anna Lee said in passing, loudly enough for her husband and Lamarr to overhear her words.
Thunderstruck, Ioletta stared after her, until dragged up the path by Angel.  Cecily gently shut the gate behind her.
“Tell your mother I’m grateful for the compliment,” Ioletta called over her shoulder.  “But the Lord has just blessed me in that department, you know.”
“I will, Miz Brown,” Cecily said, smiling sweetly.  “Wouldn’t it be a nice day for a picnic?”
“Yes it would, child, you done read my mind.”
Lamarr glanced at his watch, as Angel and his mother reached the porch.
“Angel didn’t like the service, Momma?” He asked, surprised to see his mother this early.  Alliance Baptist usually did not let out until an hour or two after Flowers Baptist.
“Oh, it wasn’t Angel,” she said.  “He loved it, like I knew he would.  But Reverend Champion, he done called for testimonies about last night’s fracas, as he called it, and after I told about all the prayin’ and how the Lord preserved us all and nobody except that one boy was hurt, he made a’ early altar call.  Awful disappointed, he was, to not see you there, after you savin’ Stella Jo an’ Angel.”
Odoms helped Angel up the stairs and then pushed the door open to let him inside, while Lamarr helped his mother.
“You told him about my pulling the ox out of the ditch an’ all, I s’pose,” he said.
“I wasn’t tellin’ him that fool story, boy!” She retorted.  “Maybe I cain’t do it, but he would chop that smart-alecky talk of yours into little bitty pieces--though I see you convinced Captain Odoms of the righteousness of your cause.”
“Miz Brown,” Odoms said in greeting.
“Captain Odoms,” she answered, giving him the once over.  Fine sawdust had unavoidably drifted over his dark suit pants and found its way into every crease and wrinkle.  The webbing of his holster had not been spared, either.  “I see you haven’t just been directin’ my Lamarr here while he goes about his business.”
“I’ve made a noble effort to stay out of his way, Miz Brown, while your Lamarr did the lion’s share of the work.  I’ve had the pleasure of discovering that he is not only a credit to the U.S. Army and its corps of military policemen, as he proved last night, but also a very competent hand at the carpentry trade.”
For the second time in a few short minutes, Ioletta appeared thunderstruck, whether by the fact that Chance Odoms had actually spoken with her, especially in a gentlemanly manner, or by the sudden avalanche of compliments, it would be difficult to say.  Regaining her composure, she nodded to both men and followed Angel through the door, having first glanced approvingly at their handiwork.
Lamarr raised one eyebrow at Odoms.  In a few moments, the groaning of the floorboards died away.  Likely as not, he figured, she was on her way to the kitchen.
“I’m impressed, sir,” he said.  “I see there’s a lot I could learn from you.”
“When it comes to flatterin’ the fairer sex, I doubt you have much to learn from me, Lamarr,” he said, a smile creasing his face.
“The fairer sex, my mother?” Lamarr said, surprised.
“The heart is everything, son.  Everything.”
An image of his mother flashed through Lamarr’s mind. Then the decidedly elegant Anna Lee Odoms standing at the foot of the stairs, a chilly expression on her face, and Cecily by the gate, smiling sweetly.
“Hmmh, I see what you mean,” he said.  He scratched at his nose and hoped Odoms couldn’t read his mind.  “But we have work enough to do here without worrying about--about the fairer sex.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Odoms said, mentally noting Lamarr’s nervousness and abrupt change of subject.  He had been a keen observer of people long before launching into his career as a homicide cop, and he knew all too well how his intense gaze made people squirm.  It helped that he had the visage of an eagle.  Hardened criminals had been known to crack beneath that gaze.  He decided to take it easy on poor Lamarr.
“You know what I like about you, Lamarr?”
“Me, sir?”
“You’re a man of character.  Give me a man of character to any thousand other men.”
Lamarr, modest as always, felt his face burn, and hid it by running his hand over his stubbled cheeks.
Both men came down the steps to better examine the damage to the porch.  When Leonard McIlhenny had replaced the original, rotted out wraparound porch, he had not done any of the fancy work often seen on Southern houses.  While he had put up railings, they were unpainted and unvarnished 2x4s as were the vertical pieces, and the decking was more of the same.  There were no architectural details to be admired, and no screened enclosures to keep out the flying insects so fond of humid Southern nights.  It was all utilitarian, functional and cheap, which meant repair of the porch would require little in the way of reconstruction or refinishing work.  A total of eight 2x4s had been damaged on the deck itself by their abrupt acquaintance with the intruder’s Camaro, not counting insult to the railings, while the support beams were virtually untouched.
The two men were silent, as they walked back to Leonard McIlhenny’s shed to dig out the required number of 2x4 studs.  Chance Odoms knew to bide his time; Lamarr would say his piece when he was ready.
“Old Len had himself paint enough,” Odoms commented, spying buckets stacked overhead on a plywood sheet laid atop the shed’s open trusses.  “’Course, after all these years it’d be dried out junk.”
“I s’pose,” Lamarr said, rifling a 2x4 through the open doorway.  “It’d be nice to paint the door and all for Miss Stella, though.”
“It’s too bad you can’t stick around.”
Lamarr glanced sideways at him.
“If you’ve ever taken advice from anyone, I’d say early tomorrow morning wouldn’t be too soon for you to make yourself scarce around these parts.”
“Is that comin’ from you official like?” Lamarr asked, genuinely pained.
“Let’s say it comes from someone who knows officials and their officious ways, son,” he said, spreading his hands in defeat.
“But I didn’t do nothin’ wrong!”
He snorted.  “Wrong?  What’s that to do with it? If it were up to me, the mayor would throw you a banquet and pin a medal on your chest in front of the whole dadgummed city--but that ain’t gonna happen.”
Lamarr looked thoughtful, as he and Odoms picked up the lumber from the ground, each easily manhandling a half-dozen 8' studs.  They carried them to the front of the house and Odoms set his share down gently, watching as Lamarr threw his down in disgust and then commenced tearing off the 2x4 decking with his bare hands.
“I could be wrong,” Odoms said, wincing as Lamarr flung the last damaged piece halfway across the yard, where it bounced harmlessly off one of Angel’s statues.
“No sir, you’re not wrong,” he said.  Blood dripped from the fingers of his right hand.  “Any fool knows that.”
“It’s the way of the world, Lamarr, at least the sorry, benighted world you and I know.”
Lamarr took a seat on the porch steps.  “I know, sir,” he said.  Right hand in his left, he watched the blood trickle into his palm and dribble onto his wrist.  It was just a scratch, really, a cut from a wood splinter.  His gaze wandered to the street, seemingly contemplating it with the same sort of fixed attention as any of Angel’s statues.
“It’ll be hard for my momma to understand my leavin’ so soon, sir,” he said.
“Oh, she’ll understand,” Odoms said, confident it wasn’t anything that would surprise her.  “Like it or not, she’ll understand.”
Lamarr looked sideways at him, as Odoms took a seat on the stairs.  Keen observer that he was, the detective knew Lamarr wanted to say something.
Lamarr cleared his throat.
“I’m listening,” Odoms said, his gaze on the street.  He had almost forgotten it was Sunday.  People strolled on the sidewalks in their best Sunday-go-to-meetin’ clothes--young couples, old couples, and here and there a man or woman walking alone.  Children rode by on their Schwinns and Raleighs or on street skates.  More than one person glanced curiously in their direction, at the young soldier in his undershirt and the grizzled detective with necktie and gun.
Out of habit Chance reached for his cigarettes, remembering too late that Anna Lee, who abhorred smoking around the church, was always careful to empty them from his pockets on Sundays.  Which was tolerable, as long as he was able to keep his hands busy, like today.  Normally, though, he had to sit for an hour or two, inwardly seething until he could get home to the privacy of his back porch.
“My father died before he could leave us,” Lamarr said.
“Interesting manner of looking at things,” Odoms remarked.  With an effort he focused his attention fully on Lamarr, who shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands in resignation.
“That’s the way it is for some folks.”
“Regrettable but true.”
“I never had a chance to do nothin’ with him,” Lamarr said wistfully, no longer seeing the street, or the path lined with Angel’s statues.  “To go fishin’, or play ball, or ax for his advice about nuthin’.”
The detective nodded, purposely shifting his gaze to his shoes.  They needed a good dusting.
“I sure wasn’t axin’ no advice from all those old fools on the street corners--shootin’ the breeze, drinkin’ from their brown paper bags and laughin’ like they knew somethin’ no one else did.”
“There was Reverend Champion,” Chance offered, then bit his tongue, afraid he might have said the wrong thing.
“Oh, I’m grateful to Reverend Champion and Elder Wiggins an’ all them,” Lamarr said.  “I am.  But it’s still not like having your own old man.”
“Ummh,” Odoms agreed, remembering the good times with his own father.  The memories were still fresh, perhaps seared into his mind by the car wreck that killed his father a few days before Chance turned sixteen.  A week later he had joined the Marine Corps and made it his family until he married Anna Lee just before the war.
“So I wonder what it would be like to ax advice from a white man who never had no sons,” Lamarr said at last.  “Me bein’ who I am, and all, and so often hatin’ the way I see the world run.”
Chance felt goose bumps on his arms.  It was a good thing he had not rolled up his sleeves.  Maybe no one else would understand it, certainly none of the men he worked with on the Calneh police force, but he felt deeply honored.  And not up to the task.
“Would that white boy be sitting next to you?” He asked.
Lamarr grinned.  “I think I’m talking to the right person, sir.”
“Well, if it’s me you’re axin’--asking advice, the first thing I would say is that you only address God as sir, Him and the few people you absolutely have to say it to in the service.”
“Does that mean you, too, sir?”
“Especially me.  I hear sir or Captain so much in my line of work, it makes me want to puke, and anyways I would appreciate your calling me Chance like everybody else around here.”
“Can’t say I know nobody on this street who calls you nuthin’ but Captain Odoms or sir,” Lamarr said, laughing.  “That’s uncomfortable, I’ll tell you.  I bet most the time your wife calls you Captain.”
“Well, that’s different.  Point is, you call a lot of people sir, they’ll be looking down their noses at you though you’re a man’s man and have ten times the character, to boot.”
“All right, Chance,” he said.  “But since I’m leavin’ early tomorrow, there’s not much time for practice.”
Out of the corner of one eye, Odoms spied his daughter on the sidewalk in a long, yellow sun dress and white sneakers.  He doubted the wicker picnic basket in one hand and the green and white Thermos jug swinging from the other hand were Anna Lee’s idea.  As hungry as he was, the time closing on 2 o’clock, he hated to cut short his conversation with Lamarr.  It wasn’t many young men, white or black, who asked advice from a cop.  Most of the ones he came into contact with were far beyond the point of asking for anyone’s advice, except maybe for a few who entertained hopes of flattering their way out of an arrest.
“You ever watched Gomer Pyle on TV, Lamarr?”
Lamarr’s eyebrows arched in surprise.
“Sure,” he said.  “A couple times.  ’Bout laughed my head off.”
“What do you think was funny about it?”
“Dumb white hick who talks funny,” Lamarr said, not even having to think about it.
“Who does everything wrong but it comes out right in the end because he has a good heart?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Lamarr said, nodding agreement.
“You were saying how you didn’t like how the world is run.”
“That’s right--” Lamarr saw Cecily at the gate with her burdens.  He pushed himself to his feet.
“Lamarr, wait,” Chance said.  Lamarr hesitated, looking down at him, obviously anxious to play the gentleman.
“You wanted advice.”
“Sure.”
“Unfortunately people aren’t always impressed with a good heart.”
“And?”
“But they do think people are dumb if they speak differently.”
Lamarr stiffened.  Chance stood and dusted his hands on his slacks.  At that moment, Ioletta swung open the door and walked onto the porch.
“Lamarr honey, could you help me with Angel?” She asked, at the same time waving to Cecily.  “We’re havin’ us a picnic!”
Lamarr frowned, glancing at his mother and then back at the gate.  Chance was striding down the path to let his daughter in.
“All right,” he said.  Leaping up the stairs, he followed his mother into the house.  For the first time in years, he almost hated Angel.
“Hello, Daddy,” Cecily said, waiting patiently, swinging the picnic basket and Thermos jug in her hands.  Opening the gate for her, he let her smile warm his heart, which had suddenly felt as cold as a stone.
“I don’t imagine this was your mother’s idea,” he said.
“It was Ioletta’s, actually.  She rang up on the phone and I happened to be the one to answer.  Of course mother took persuading, but she finally gave in, it being Sunday, and you and Lamarr doing a good deed for Miz McIlhenny.”
“And she approved of your dress?” He asked, relieving her of the picnic basket and strolling beside her on the path.  While the sundress covered her long, slender legs adequately, it revealed more of her bust than he thought proper.
“Would you believe she suggested pink, Daddy, which I’ve always abhorred?”
Chance cocked an eyebrow at her, all too familiar with his daughter’s penchant for leg pulling--his leg, at least.
“Yellow is so much more attractive with my hair.”
“I shouldn’t let you out on the streets at all,” he muttered.
“Oh, Daddy,” she said.  “It is such a warm day, and I’ve always been the safest little girl in the world, with a daddy like you.”
Not the gun thing again, he hoped.  She always ribbed him about his guns.
“You do still wear that ankle holster of yours, don’t you, Daddy?”
“Never take it off,” he said, thinking he seemed to mutter around Cecily a lot.
“Look, here are Ioletta and Lamarr and Angel,” she said, brightening visibly.
Lamarr carried Angel, sans leg braces, down the steps, and if Angel noticed Lamarr squeezed him too tightly around the chest, he did not complain.  Behind them, on the porch, Ioletta bore a large metal tray of foodstuffs covered with a red and white checkered tea towel.  Chance winced, hoping Ioletta would wait to set foot on the stairs until after her son and Angel cleared the bottom step.
“Over by the willow tree, honey,” Ioletta directed.  Lamarr left the path, crossed over the skid marks from last night and veered toward the corner nearest the McIlhenny driveway, the church property line just beyond it.  Chance and his daughter changed direction accordingly.  It was one of the few places on the grounds that was shaded, and Ioletta could just as well have said “by the tree,” since it was the only tree in the front yard.  Out back, behind the shed, there were two ancient trees that bore the best pie apples in the city, which was providential, since Stella Jo and Ioletta also made the best apple pies of anyone around.
“Lamarr, could you fetch us some blankets from the house?” Ioletta asked as he set Angel down in a patch of stunted grass.
“Yes’m,” he said, his brow bunched in frustration, as he crossed paths with Cecily and her father.
“Now won’t this be nice!” Ioletta declared.  “You just set those things down next to mine, Miss Cecily and Captain Odoms, until Lamarr returns with the blankets.  We’ll be just fine here in the shade.
“Are you all right, Angel?” She asked.
Angel hummed, perfectly satisfied, no foreigner to sitting on the ground without use of either a chair or blanket, though he often sat on a three-legged wooden stool while carving stone.
“Is that lemonade or iced tea in that jug of yours, Miss Cecily?” She asked.
“Lemonade,” Cecily answered.  “I do hope you have spare ice cubes, Miz Brown.  I brought along plastic cups in our picnic basket, but I’m afraid we were out of ice at home.”
“Lamarr,” Ioletta said, as he arrived with the blankets, which were olive drab, evidently Army issue from WWII, and scratchy wool.  “Honey, will you fetch some of them ice cube trays out of Stella Jo’s icebox?”
A look of defeat in his eyes, Lamarr dropped the blankets by his mother and turned once again toward the house.
“And don’t forget to wash your hands, boy,” she called after him.
To his credit, he said nothing in reply.  But Chance thought he saw blood trickling from Lamarr’s lower lip, when he came back with the ice cube trays.
“The boy must be tired or somepin’,” Ioletta said, moving her tray of foodstuffs to the grass next to Angel.  She picked up one of the blankets dumped unceremoniously at her feet, and shot it out neatly, letting it float to the ground.  One would be just about right for her.  It wouldn’t do to soil her best Sunday go-to-meetin’ dress.
“Miss Cecily--” she indicated the second blanket, which she spread next to her own.  The men, who had neither one seen the inside of church that morning, could sit anywhere, as long as it was on the ground.
“Will there be others joining us today?” Cecily asked, as she gracefully settled to her knees and opened the picnic basket.
“There may be, I don’t know,” Ioletta replied.  “Whole neighborhood knows about last night, so I don’t guess they’ll be expectin’ our usual feast with Stella.”
“I’m sure there will be enough for us all, if anyone does make an appearance,” Cecily said.
Ioletta cast a doubtful eye toward the basket which, to her, appeared almost empty.  There was one little bitty roasted chicken in there, and what looked like must be a mess of potato salad.  She was glad she had put a couple of chickens on to cook in Stella Jo’s gas oven that morning before church.  The girl must eat like a bird, if she thought one little chicken could feed anybody!
Ioletta proudly whipped off the red and white checkered tea towel from her tray, revealing two roasted chickens the size of young turkeys, a green salad in a wooden bowl, and orange-flavored fruit Jello in a Tupperware container she’d found in the fridge.  Just as quickly she moaned to herself, realizing she had forgotten the eating utensils.  But here was Lamarr, ice trays in hand.
“Lamarr--”
“Yes Momma,” he said, broad shoulders tensing.
“I only come as far as Stella Jo’s coffee table with the silverware and the carving knife, honey.”
“Don’t worry,” Chance Odoms interrupted, pushing himself to his feet.  “I’ll bring them, Lamarr.  You sit and rest a while.”
Looking grateful, Lamarr handed the ice over to his mother and plopped himself down, landing on the overlapping edges at the foot of the blankets between Ioletta and Cecily, with his back to both of the women.
“God!” He said.
“Lamarr!” Ioletta spoke sharply.
“Just feelin’ weary, Momma,” he said.  “It was a long night, last night.”
“I’m sure you had yourself as much sleep as I did,” she said.  “No reason to be irreverent.”
“Which was none, then,” he retorted.  “It’s too excitin’, havin’ someone try to cut your heart out, and the police wantin’ to blow your brains out besides.”
“You could have gone to church with me this morning and rested up, instead of working on the Sabbath.”
“At Reverend Champion’s?” He said, glancing in her direction.  She was surely joking.  While a person might find peace for his soul at Alliance Baptist, they certainly wouldn’t find rest.  If they weren’t always standing, shouting and singing, they were listening to Rev. Champion shout and sing, whose voice carried like the foghorn of a tugboat off the Gulf.  In either case, no one slept through meetings at Alliance.  Uh-uh.  Even if you tried, someone would likely poke you in the ribs.  A certain woman well in excess of--well, he wasn’t sure how much she weighed, but she certainly came to mind.
“My father says you were very brave, Lamarr,” Cecily said.
The sun seemed to have come out from behind dark clouds.  From somewhere in the sky, a chorus of mockingbirds broke into song.  Lamarr repositioned himself to face Cecily, only to find that the ground sloped upwards and there seemed to be a rock under his tailbone.  Why did people have to sit on the ground for a picnic lunch?  Where was the attraction in it?  He could do the same any old time, eat rations with an Army platoon under the open sky.
He decided to stretch out on his side, and propped himself on one elbow.  The rock stretched with him.  He investigated under the blanket and discovered a seam of granite fashioned into a series of cameo reliefs.  Once Angel had given them beatific smiles but now they leered at him.
“I done what needed doin’,” he said, quickly resettling the blanket.
“I hope that includes moving over,” Chance said, returning with the utensils, which were well-used stainless steel, veterans of countless feasts, not polished silverware.
Lamarr gathered in his long legs and sat up.
“I’ll give you the honors,” Odoms said, handing over the carving knife to Ioletta.  Joints popping, he lowered himself slowly to his knees and distributed knives, forks, and spoons.
From the depths of her picnic basket, Cecily took paper plates, which soon were piled high all around with food.  It was not, perhaps, the picnic any of them might have envisioned enjoying.  True to Ioletta’s suspicions, Cecily ate like a bird.  Lamarr did not eat with nearly his usual gusto, and his mind seemed preoccupied with events elsewhere.  Ioletta kept glancing at her son, wondering what could be the matter even as she polished off half of an entire chicken by herself.
Fingers itching for a cigarette, Chance munched thoughtfully at his portion of chicken, green salad, and potato salad, every once in a while glancing between his daughter and Lamarr.  Of them all, probably only Angel truly enjoyed the moment.  He hummed as he spooned in his last mouthful of Jello salad.  If he was worried about his mother, who Chance had reassured him had gone to the hospital for a short rest, no one could tell it.



****



Chapter 7

From long habit, a childhood habit, to be accurate, (which would have required as many years of counseling and support to break as any thirst for alcohol or the craving for tobacco), Lamarr took the concrete stairs in two strides, and stood at the church’s front entrance.  Lifting one hand, he pounded his fist on the oak-paneled double doors.  He glanced at his watch.  Six o’clock, straight up.
If he was lucky Rev. Champion had taken the day off or slept in for once.  Even barbers didn’t work Mondays, Lamarr reasoned.  Certainly, barbers weren’t up every day before the crack of dawn to pray over their flock, even if their task in life was to shear them.
Thank God, he mused, I’ll never be a preacher.  He pounded on the door again and glanced at his watch.  The Reverend’s office was at the rear of the building.  Maybe he was taking his time, or maybe he hadn’t heard?
A garbage truck rumbled by on the street, and Lamarr wrinkled his nose and held his breath at the smell of diesel and trash.  Time to be amblin’ on.  But because he had promised his mother he would drop by the church and make a real effort to say goodbye before leaving for other parts of the country, he knocked once more, this time sharply rapping the door with his knuckles.
Gone fishin’, he thought.  His watch said 6:02.  He had waited long enough.  One step, habit again, took him halfway down the stairs.
The doors opened behind him.  “Lamarr--”
He turned at the sound of the familiar, rumbling voice, and remounted the stairs.  Rev. Champion, attired in the requisite black suit, white shirt and black necktie, motioned him inside and then pulled the door shut.  Lamarr could not recall having ever seen the man in anything but this same suit or ones exactly like it.  Rev. Champion held his office in dignity and even under a blazing sun did not remove jacket and tie for the church’s annual summer picnic.
“Your mother told me you would be coming, son,” he said.  Gesturing for him to follow, Rev. Champion led the way from the foyer and into the dimly-lit sanctuary.  Down the church’s central aisle they walked, past thirty rows of highly polished beech wood pews, skirted the wide stage (which could not contain Rev. Champion’s perambulations when he was under the unction, un-anchored by either tradition or convention to the pulpit standing at center [the communion altar below it, the words DO THIS IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME carved into its front for all to see]), the baptistry twenty feet behind it, just beyond the carpeted risers used Sundays by the church’s 72-member choir, and past the church organ, a Wurlitzer, until they finally came to his book-lined office.
There wasn’t a square inch in the place that did not bring back memories for Lamarr.  Here he had sat beside his mother through not hundreds but thousands of sermons, almost within reach of the Wurlitzer pump organ from the front row pew.  Here he had the fear of God put in him at an early age, and God Himself must sound like Rev. Champion, whose barrel-chested voice could shake the rafters overhead and rattle the stained-glass windows.  Here he had learned John 3:16 and that he must be born again, and had been baptized with a dozen other young teens one summer evening.  Here he had seen weddings and funerals and baby dedications, and heard evildoers and evil doings rebuked and wise men and not a few wise women praised.  Here he had learned that he had a fine bass voice for singing but that he did not care to use it in front of others, even if it might bring glory to God, as his mother said.  Here he had burned with shame one Sunday morning when his mother was especially exercised over the music, the pew they were in giving up the ghost as it shattered, to the raucous laughter and sudden applause of the brothers and sisters--who at that moment did not much seem like brothers and sisters.
“Shout hallelujah!”
What he did not remember (embarrassment having burned it from his memory) was that as his mother floundered and thrashed upon her backside, Rev. Champion had leapt from the stage and, in a demonstration of Samson-like strength, lifted her to her feet.
“Praise the Lord!  Dance, sister!” He shouted, gesturing for her to follow him.  The entire row emptied, as he led the way into the aisle, and then began a circuit of the sanctuary.  A sign from him to the music director drew forth a new burst of music--drums, trumpets, and guitars leading the way.  It wasn’t exactly a conga line, but it wasn’t far different, except that no conga line had ever seen such exuberant shouting, clapping, and singing of praises to the Lord.  Then he’d stepped aside and gestured for Ioletta to lead.  The pews emptied, everyone in the congregation, from young to old, following suit.  In the excitement band members joined them, grabbing up their instruments and falling in line wherever they could squeeze in.
Returning to his pulpit, Rev. Champion shouted, “Are we gonna let some broken down pew stop us from praising the Lord?”
“No!” Came the answering shout.
“Are we gonna let the devil keep us from praisin’ the Lord?”
“No!”
The next thing anyone knew, the Lord’s conga line snaked its way out of the sanctuary and onto the sidewalk.  Soon they were circling the church property, hundreds of people exuberantly praising the Lord.  The drummer grabbed his snare drum from its stand, and the pianist and organist, wishing they could carry their instruments, gave up and ran after the drummer.  Last to follow were several elders sitting on stage at their usual places in support of the pastor.
Rev. Champion had the wisdom to know there was no way his people could be lured back inside the church building.  When their exuberance faded, he ended the service by preaching a brief sermon from the church steps.
But for the moment, Lamarr remembered none of this.
Rev. Champion’s office was perhaps the least familiar ground to him in the church, even if he had sat here, too, at least a dozen times over the years.  The first time, as with most things, was the time he remembered best.  His mother had brought him and ordered him to explain why he hadn’t learned the catechism.  Of course, as a boy of eleven, he didn’t know that most Baptist eyebrows would rise at the sound of such a Catholic-flavored word, but if Catholic boys and girls could learn the catechism, then the Baptist children of Alliance could certainly learn a catechism of their own.  On the same occasion, Rev. Champion demanded of him why he could not seem to learn his multiplication tables at school.  His teachers and mother had been asking the same question for two years running, but none of them had the gravity of Rev. Champion, his rumbling voice or the intense gaze that could be turned on and off like a searchlight.
Now he took his place and motioned for Lamarr to sit in one of the four high-backed leather chairs arrayed in a semi-circle around his wide, ornate desk.
Lamarr sat and took a deep breath, letting the smell of leather and books take him back through the years.  His first time here he had been too afraid to look at anything other than the desk and the man behind it.  The second time here his eyes had grown big, as they took in the towering shelves of books and he wondered how anyone could ever read even half of them, “not one of them fiction,” his mother would say.
Cedric would have argued with the fiction part, since there were volumes of apocryphal writings he had collected over the years, and shelves of opinion on everything from creation and evolution to the contradictory theories about Revelation and the end of all things.  And while he had read these books and knew the arguments, he preached the Bible, seldom quoting anyone outside of it in his sermons, unless it could be backed nine ways from Sunday with other Scripture.  Hadn’t that been the whole point of the Reformers’ Sola Scriptura?
It was a moment before Lamarr, reflecting briefly on his memories, realized there was someone else present.  Partially hidden by a tall chair, a man stood next to the windows.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Reverend Champion,” Lamarr apologized, rising to his feet.  “I didn’t realize you had a visitor, sir.”
“Don’t worry yourself, son,” he said, motioning him back into his seat.  He hesitated before saying, “Brother Winfield dropped by unexpectedly.
“I missed you at our meetings yesterday,” he went on quickly.  “We couldn’t be prouder of you, son, of what you did the other night, taking your life into your own hands to save Sister McIlhenny and her son.”
Lamarr’s attention was momentarily on Brother Winfield, as Rev. Champion had called the short, whippet-thin man dressed in the black-and-white uniform of a minister.  Rev. Champion’s hesitation had been like a wink between them, and Lamarr knew he wasn’t expected to believe the man’s name was really Winfield.  The strangeness of the introduction faded, as he remembered Rev. Champion was sought out for counsel by many black ministers.  Like any parishioner, they would want that counsel kept in strictest confidence.
“I only did what anybody shoulda done,” Lamarr said.
“You risked your life, son.”
“I thought the cops would blow my brains out, until Captain Odoms come in and took control of the situation.”
A choking sound came from the direction of the short man in black, and Lamarr’s eyebrows went up.
“Odoms is a white honky, racist pig--”  A string of profanities followed.
Lamarr glanced at Rev. Champion, unfazed by the words but shocked that he was hearing them in this room, which had always been the closest thing to a holy of holies one could find at Alliance Baptist.  Worse, they came from the lips of a minister.  Reflexively, Lamarr opened and closed his fists, itching to take the smaller man by the collar to toss him out, but fully expecting Rev. Champion to rise--like the wrath of God--to do the job himself.
“Our brother here has had some disagreements with Captain Odoms,” Rev. Champion spoke with forced mildness.
“Captain?” Winfield snorted.  “The only title he should hold is Grand Wizard of the KKK!  He deserves to be hung by the heels and have his white skin stripped off his white bones.”
“I think I should be movin’ on, sir,” Lamarr addressed Rev. Champion.  Yesterday, after talking and working with Chance Odoms, he had come away thinking the man was racist, too.  Especially after his remarks about talking differently.  But if Odoms was racist, it wasn’t one-tenth of what he felt spewing from Winfield.
“I’ll come with you,” Rev. Champion said, abruptly rising from his chair.
Lamarr stopped just short of the office doorway.
“Brother Winfield,” he said.
“Yessir?”
“I know Chance Odoms.  He helped me do repairs over at the McIlhenny’s place yesterday and had lunch with me and my mother after.”
“It’s not like you was marryin’ his daughter, boy,” he shot back.
“She was there, too,” Lamarr said, kneading his powerful fists.  “We even sat on the same blanket.”
Winfield glared rabidly, his hatred palpable, perhaps holding his tongue only because of Lamarr’s implied threat.
Rev. Champion glanced between the two men and touched Lamarr on one arm, signaling that they should go.  Neither spoke as they retraced their steps through the church, Lamar wondering if the place would ever feel the same again, or if his confrontation with Brother Winfield would forever foul its memory.  Expecting only to be seen to the door, he was surprised that Rev. Champion followed him out and gestured for him to have a seat on the concrete steps.
“Sometimes you have to let a man have his say, as unpleasant as it may seem,” the minister told him, settling on the top step, heedless of his black suit pants.
“Chance ain’t no racist, not really,” Lamarr said, his eyes on the morning traffic, two beat-up old pickups, both of them sporting more rust than paint, crossing in opposite directions.
Rev. Champion stared at Lamarr, wondering about his use of Odoms’ first name.  “To you he’s not a racist,” he said.  “And to me he’s not a racist, least not like some.  But to--to him and a lot of others, he’s racist.”
“Why would that be, sir?”
“A long time ago Odoms shot and killed his older brother.”
A thrill of recognition ran like electricity down Lamarr’s spine.  While raised with the belief that Chance was the bogeyman, and as familiar as anyone with the sight of his guns, until now the stories he’d heard of his killing people had never struck close to home.
“I remember it, but the name wasn’t Winfield, was it?  I don’t think I was even in school, yet.”
“That’s right.”
“Was it in the line of duty?” He asked, looking thoughtful.  “Was the brother doin’ the crime?”
“That’s the point, son,” Rev. Champion said.  “Those kinds of questions don’t matter to most folks.”
“But was he--?”
He silenced Lamarr with a disbelieving squint.  “It so easily slips your mind that most of us don’t think like a policeman?”  He shook his head and sighed deeply.  “The boy was robbin’ a liquor store--he was totin’ a Saturday night special.
“But like I said, it doesn’t matter, not if you’re the one looking from the inside out.  Life is much easier when you’re the one looking from the outside in, demanding justice.”
“That don’t make him racist.”
“Oh, there’s racism enough in all of us to go around,” Rev. Champion said wearily.  “But I know you didn’t drop by this early in the morning to hear the brother spout off about Chance Odoms.”
“I just come to say goodbye,” Lamarr told him.  “I’m leavin’ and then I’ll be headin’ off to Korea.”
“A little early, but I understand, son.”  Pulling Lamarr close, Rev. Champion wrapped an arm around his shoulders.  “Almighty God,” he prayed, “I ask for this boy’s protection wherever he goes.  Let your grace always be upon his life, your strength within him, the resolve to do what’s right in the face of evil, your word to guard his footsteps, and your Spirit to keep his soul.  In the precious name of Jesus, you know we love him, Lord.  Amen.”
Lamarr opened his eyes and saw Rev. Champion brush away a tear.
“Let us know how everything is with you in Korea, son,” the minister said, as both of them pushed to their feet.
“Oh, you all be hearin’ from me, that’s for sure,” Lamarr said, and descended the stairs.  He turned to wave one last time before heading home, where his suitcases were packed and ready to go.  It was 6:30 and he had a bus to catch at 7:00.  While he had gone to the church to say goodbye because of his mother’s wishes, his real hope had been to ask advice from Rev. Champion.  After talking with Chance Odoms the day before, he had thought he would like a different perspective on things.
But Rev. Champion’s views weren’t new to him.  He had heard them thundered from the pulpit (and all around it) and expounded at close quarters in small Bible studies most of his life.  He wouldn’t likely forget them anytime soon.
One thing Lamarr was glad of, though, not once had he called Brother Winfield sir.



****



Part Three

Chapter 8

After a day and a half in the hospital, Stella Jo came home, none the worse for the wear with a diagnosis of hyperventilation.  She would have come home sooner, except that the hospital staff was shorthanded because of the weekend and wanted to wait for the local heart specialist to return from his fishing safari on the Gulf before ordering a series of tests.  Since her mind had skipped a beat or two because of her ordeal, she didn’t notice the front door of her house had been replaced and a different screen door installed, or that the porch, so recently acquainted with the front end of a late model Chevy Camaro, had been expertly repaired.  Neither did she notice the patch job on the fence where the Chevy plowed its way into the yard.  Perhaps it’s needless to say, too, that she failed to notice the nearly miraculous lack of damage to Angel’s statues.
In fact it was five full months before Stella Jo noticed any of it.  She and Ioletta and Angel were in her kitchen, working on Sunday dinner, with Stella hacking away at four plump chickens sacrificed for the occasion (actually Piggly Wiggly’s had acquired them from somebody else who’d done the sacrificing).  Ioletta tenderly ministered over okra and a mess of greens, since she was justly proud of her reputation for fixin’ the aforesaid vegetables.  And Angel, sitting at the table set for twelve but likely to expand by a few card tables, labored over a mountain of freshly picked snap beans.
Stella let drop the meat cleaver and sat down beside her son.  Ioletta, her sister in the spirit, looked up from her work, wondering if something was wrong.  The iron skillets were out, bacon grease waiting, but Stella had not yet dredged the chicken pieces through her favorite blend of flour and spices.
“Ioletta.”
“Ummh?”
“Who fixed my front door and the porch after that dreadful night?”
Ioletta rocked back on her heels a moment.  She could think of only one dreadful night in recent memory. “You’re axin’ me now?”
“Yes,” she said, her eyes growing big with the realization that she had somehow blocked the events of that night from her mind.  “And you know why?”
“No, honey.”
“Because that crazy Mr. Rames was watering his vegetable patch last night at midnight.”
“Midnight?”  Ioletta said, indignant.  “I’d be afraid of rape!  What was the fool doin’ in your yard at midnight?”
“Oh, he said some crazy thing about water evaporation,” she answered, not even blinking at the imagery of anyone attempting to molest Ioletta.  “I think the man had been drinking.”
“I hope you called the police on him.  Cain’t believe he was watering at midnight--and him not even from our street.”
“Well, I did tell him I was calling Captain Odoms if he didn’t go home right then and there--which was just about the time he ran into one of Angel’s statues.”
“I hope it was the one I think it was,” Ioletta said, her eyes lighting with mirth.
“Well, it is right next to his summer squash.”
Ioletta could see the statue in her mind’s eye, the angel lying on its back, half-emerged from stone, one arm upraised, the hand just at about hip level.
“He yelled so loud I was afraid he had broken it off--the angel’s hand, I mean!” Stella finished quickly, both women exploding in giggles, which were really more like what most people would call hoots and hollers.  Anyone on the street could have heard them, even though the kitchen was at the back of the house, and the house sat back thirty yards from the sidewalk.  Stella glanced guiltily at Angel, who was humming one of his hymns as he transformed the mountain of beans into a pyramid.
“I don’t think he’ll be comin’ over in the dark again,” Ioletta remarked, finally controlling herself.
“No, surely not,” Stella said.
“Midnight!”  Ioletta clucked.  “We cain’t be lettin’ people from just anywhere come in to garden here--they have to find a patch over on their own street.”
“But it reminded me, woke me up, Ioletta.  Was it Lamarr who fixed my door?”
“Him and Captain Odoms.”
“I didn’t even thank Lamarr,” she said, sadly shaking her head.  “Or Captain Odoms, either.”
“Oh, Lamarr, he understood.  It’s not like he’s used to receivin’ thank you notes.  And I’m sure Captain Odoms has seen that kind of thing before.”
“I should have paid him--he’s always been such a help--but how do you thank somebody for saving your life and fixing your door?”
“That was a terrible night,” Ioletta commented.  “I thought you was goin’ to be killed.  You thought you was goin’ to be killed.  Lamarr thought he was--I s’pose even your Angel thought he was to be killed.”
Stella’s eyes stared distantly.
“You ever hear what happened to that boy?” Ioletta asked.
“No, I imagine he’s been put in prison, by now.”
“Prison!” Ioletta exclaimed.  “You don’t know nothin’ about the law, do you?”
“What I’ve seen on TV,” she said, unoffended.
“What, Perry Mason?”  She said, sniffing loudly.  “You’ve lived a sheltered life, Stella Jo.  If you was black, you’d know the courts don’t work like that.  I’m sure they will have you come up to the trial and testify and everything when it’s time, meaning when they feel like it and not a minute before.  They’ll want to know what the boy did, and what you said and he said, afore he met up with my Lamarr and tried to cut his heart out with that knife.”
“You mean they’ll ask me to testify against him?”
“Well, yes, that is the point, ’course they’ll ax you twenty different ways, like to prove you’re not deaf and all.  And that’s the man on your side.  Then the defense will try to tear down everthin’ you said, and they’ll argue back and forth, doin’ their bestest to figure out what you really meant and if it’s possible for a man to do what they say he did.”
“Is it that bad?”
“That bad?  It’s worse!”
“But what about the boy, what have they done with him in the meantime?”
“Oh, he’s in jail somewheres, all right.  But you just ax Captain Odoms, he’ll tell you what you need to know.”
Stella was silent, her gaze again faraway.  Chance Odoms was not the kind of man to say much, even if she did see him in church most Sundays for twenty or thirty years.  If there was anybody on this side of town feared by the forces of evil and a terror to anyone else in the city bent on criminal misdeeds, he was it.  But he was something of a prickly pear among the righteous, as well.
“Will you go with me, Ioletta?”
“To talk to Captain Odoms, honey?”
“Nooo--I can talk to him myself.  What I was wondering is if you would go to the trial with me?”
“When they put you on the stand?  I wouldn’t miss it for the world!”
“No, I meant the whole trial.”
“The whole trial?” Ioletta asked, her eyes widening in surprise.  “Why would you want to do that, girl?  And how would you beg off work from the bus company for so long?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Stella said, uncomfortable with not being totally honest with her friend.  “But I think they’ll give me a couple of weeks, if need be.”
Ioletta chewed her lower lip.  “I think we best talk to Captain Odoms,” she said abruptly.  “That boy was a strange one, and I don’t know if it’s such a good idea, when you taken to considerin’.”
Stella didn’t say anything, as she rose wearily from her chair and lighted the gas burners to heat the skillets.  Ioletta looked on, wondering if she should press the issue of what was really on her friend’s mind.  But sometimes it was just as well to let things alone.  The woman couldn’t keep it in forever.  One thing for sure, though, it had to have something to do with that boy.  Ioletta glanced at Angel.  It must be hard on Stella, what with her tender heart and the boys lookin’ so much alike.



****



Chapter 9

Chance Odoms stared after Stella for a long moment before closing the front door of his house on her departing figure.  Even as Ioletta had chewed her lower lip while talking with Stella at the kitchen table on the day before, he chewed at his, wondering what she could be thinking.  She had asked what he knew about the case of the intruder, to which he told her that the boy’s trial was coming up any day now.  She would be called soon enough to testify.  Normally people were nervous about such affairs, wondering how they would act when interrogated by some shifty lawyer in front of a roomful of strangers, but Stella McIlhenny did not seem to display any such concern.  She seemed, rather, much more interested in the perp and what would happen to him.  Had they discovered drugs on him or in his car?  Did he have a long history of crime?  Had he ever killed or hurt anyone else?  Did anyone know his parents?
Over coffee at the breakfast table and his first morning cigarette, a filterless Camel (a habit he privately acknowledged as filthy but acquired while he was still a boy in the Marines, and even yet not severely warned against by the United States Surgeon General), he figured he best get his ducks in a row.  There was something about the woman’s sense of urgency that sent up a red flag.  A neighbor just didn’t come over and ask those kinds of questions this early in the morning, even if she was involved, when she could have picked up the phone or broached the subject at church.  Was she afraid of party lines or someone overhearing their conversation at church?
“You look very serious this morning, Clarence,” Anna Lee commented from across the table.  The rest of the world might call him “Chance,” but you wouldn’t catch her stooping to their level.  She had married well below her station when she shared vows with Clarence Odoms but was otherwise a very proper Southern woman, and even at 50 years of age people still remarked on how she reminded them of Rita Hayworth, which she invariably denied--with fetching blushes belying her ladylike composure.
But returning to Clarence, or “Chance,” as he preferred, especially since it was much more manly sounding and projected an image he liked as the city’s top homicide cop, his wife was one of the few people on earth who could recognize he looked very serious as opposed to the customary look of sobriety pasted over his face.
“I’m leaving a bit early,” he said, pushing coffee cup and saucer away and rising from the table to give her a goodbye peck on the cheek.  “Just a minor question concerning that little problem of Widow McIlhenny’s.”
“A dreadful affair,” she said, knowing he was not about to share further details of the case with her.  He was never one to burden her with his work, when such was not fit for the ears of a lady.
“A strange affair,” he said, correcting her.  “Which I hope to God does not turn any stranger.”
Her eyebrows arched in surprise.  But he had grabbed his suit jacket and was headed for the door.
“Be careful, darling,” she called after him.
Careful? he thought, though it was always her parting shot.  In spite of his nickname, he was always careful and did not take chances without being prepared and having backup plans arranged ahead of time.  That was why he needed to arrive early at the office.  He would have to make a few calls to find out what the cops had said in their reports that night about the arrest of Stella’s intruder.  He had wisely, he thought at the time, left it in their hands as the arresting officers and largely diminished his own role in defusing a bad situation.  It wasn’t like he needed the collar, and taking credit from the boys in blue would only have added insult to injury and possibly further endangered Lamarr.  Besides, one didn’t always know who was related to whom in this city.
Which said nothing about the boy in jail.  Since Stella Jo McIlhenny seemed unusually interested in him, it might be wise to find out what he could about him.  His guess was that there would be a rap sheet on him as long as his arm, and his guesses were usually pretty good.



****



Chapter 10

“Seeing in a glass darkly” described Stella Jo’s mental estate pretty well at times (sometimes for years), especially when triggered by events such as Leonard’s early passing and the tragic circumstances surrounding Angel’s birth.  But if some terrible thing could be lost or misplaced in her brain, eventually a stray shaft of light would re-illumine it, bring it back to the foreground. That’s why Stella Jo had to do what she did.  On the day of her visit to Captain Odoms to find out what she could about her intruder and his date with the court, she began making phone calls.
As an employee of the Calneh Bus Lines, Co., she could have made those phone calls in spare moments between the end of one duty and the beginning of another, but she was not one to do things that way.  She was a good Christian and she would have felt guilty, like she was stealing time from the bus company, even if it didn’t show up on her time card.  Accidentally taking home a bus company pencil, one of those yellow Ticonderoga #2s, would make her turn her rust bucket of a car around in heavy traffic to make it right, unless maybe it was an eraserless stub likely to be tossed away in the office trash.
She felt guilty enough making the phone calls on her lunch hour, while eating her sack lunch at her desk.  Maybe she should use one of the payphones out in the hallway; every little use of the phone cost someone something, she supposed.  And she didn’t want anyone thinking she was making long distance calls on the company dime.  But then again management never thought anything of asking her to stay after work a few minutes--off the clock, of course.  Minutes that pretty regularly worked themselves into a half hour or more.
About her phone calls, though.  She was interested in finding out what she could about her intruder.  Where was he lodged for the time being?  Was he in the city jail?  County lockup?  Did the boy have a lawyer, perhaps some fancy name from Montgomery hired by his parents?  That had been a nice car he drove into her porch.  Or was he at the mercy of one of those public defenders, like Ioletta told her about?  Was the boy well?  Did he have a criminal record?  Was he a drug dealer?  Had he been to a psychiatrist?
Most people wouldn’t ask all those questions or even think to ask them, but they were questions she was interested in.  Chance Odoms had told her a little, but by his hesitancy she knew something constrained him from coming right out and telling her everything she wanted to know.  She assumed, rightly or wrongly, that he was under legal constraints not to say much.  After all, he was a police official, and she was a citizen involved in a criminal affair, albeit the victim, as everyone well knew.
But she found out very quickly that no one seemed able to answer her questions.  The Calneh Police Department was loath to answer their phones, and when they finally did so, she found herself shuttled from one precinct to another, from one office to another, from one desk sergeant to--well, not to another, but simply to a ringing, unanswered phone.  No one at either the city courthouse or county courthouse was of any earthly help, either.  Was she an attorney?  Related to the accused?  A reporter, perhaps?  Then what was her legal interest in the matter?  Her credentials?
Explaining accomplished nothing.  She had expected to have her questions answered with one or two phone calls, certainly within the neat confines of one lunch hour, between bites on a chicken sandwich.  But three lunch hours later, she still did not have her answers.  In her own office at the bus company, the rule was to answer the phone by the second ring.  If a girl went for a drink out of the water cooler from one of those paper Dixie cups, she had best return to her phone by the second ring.  But officialdom, paid for by her hard-earned tax dollars, did not seem to have any such rule about answering phones promptly.  By the time she learned these lessons in the school of real life, especially that some folks did not operate by the rules she knew and respected, and had wasted her three lunch hours without hope of ever having her questions answered, she was ready to cuss.  People were right--you couldn’t fight City Hall.  Especially when City Hall didn’t answer phones or simply shuffled you off to the next person, if they didn’t send you back to one you’d the misfortune of speaking to beforehand!
Her only alternative, which she told herself she should have thought of in the first place, was to visit City Hall or the County Courthouse, or maybe even one or other jail to find out things firsthand.  Face-to-face, that was the way to do it.
Her heart quailed at the thought of visiting any of those places.  The only time she went to the county courthouse was to pay her property taxes, and when she did, it always seemed like someone eyed her suspiciously or the police were dragging some poor, handcuffed soul to justice in one of the small rooms down a corridor that dwindled off into the distance.  It never occurred to her that people often stare at an overly large woman who, in her personal distractions, has overlooked a stray hair roller or neglected here or there to properly secure a button, or whose slip is showing and threatens to fall around her ankles.  As to the poor, handcuffed souls and the corridors they were led down, they subconsciously reminded her of the damned being led away to perdition.
That’s why her fourth lunch hour was spent in trying to screw up courage enough to go to the courthouse or to one or other jail.  In any event, she needed a vacation from the phone calls.  It was on a Monday she spoke with Chance Odoms and had begun her odyssey.  So on Friday she visited the County Courthouse, which was only six blocks from the offices of the Calneh Bus Lines Co., Inc.  Unfortunately, no one seemed able or willing to answer her questions in person, either, which explained why they would not answer them over the phone.
On Saturday, she spent a great deal of time weeding the portion of garden patch she allotted to herself and Angel out of her acre or so of property.  For good measure she weeded and hoed in several of her neighbor’s garden patches, too.  If any of them noticed a few lettuces or cabbages chopped and ready for salad, though not yet dug out of the ground, no one complained--for once.
Sunday, she was especially quiet in church.  Even the new Rev. Johnny, as timid as he was and as disapproving of vociferous females as he thought St. Paul to be, noticed one of his most outspoken parishioners seemed troubled, and so he took it upon himself to ask if she was disturbed about something.  Since she wasn’t one to spill the beans about every little trouble in her life and he wasn’t one to counsel his parishioners on anything that was not directly out of the pages of Scripture, he had chosen a good subject to experiment upon.
Problems?  What problems?!?  He sighed with relief as she walked away, mechanically forcing a smile that hid her roiling emotions from anyone else nosy enough and rude enough to question her about them.
#
Stella hacked away at five blue-white chicken carcasses with her broad-bladed cleaver like she was still hoeing in the garden, chopping thistles and dandelions to smithereens.  Ioletta, one eye on her friend and one eye on the greens she was washing in the kitchen sink, could endure it no longer.
“What is wrong with you, girl?” She demanded.  Even Angel, expertly whittling turnips into roses at the table, looked up from his work and squinted at his mother.
“Nothin’,” she answered, still chopping like the chickens were demons responsible for all the troubles she’d ever had in her whole life.
“Sure am glad I don’t have your nothin’ botherin’ me!” Ioletta retorted.
Stella abruptly shoved the chickens aside and threw her cleaver down on the counter.  She might have thrown herself immediately into a kitchen chair and buried her face in her hands and bawled her eyes out, except that handling raw poultry was serious business requiring her to first wash her hands in the sink with soap and hot water.  But even after that she didn’t throw herself into a chair; if she’d been one to throw herself into furniture, it would have been reduced to kindling long ago, heavy oak or otherwise.
Instinctively, Ioletta came and put an arm around her shoulders.  Angel, from across the table, extended his hand to give her his own comforting touch.  Ioletta knew better than to blurt her question again.  Least not right away.
“What’s troublin’ you, honey?” She asked, no longer able to bridle her curiosity.
Stella blubbered away, not answering.  Ioletta glanced questioningly at Angel, though she knew he couldn’t see more than an inch or two beyond his own face and wouldn’t, in any case, offer an opinion.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Stella sobbed, still hiding behind her hands.  “Nothin’, I guess.”
“Well, it ain’t jist nothin’, so you may as well spill it, Stella Jo.  You be drivin’ me crazy if you don’t, and you know it, too.”
Stella quit her blubbering, and Ioletta sat down in a chair beside her to wait.  Stella wiped her eyes with the back of one hand and then covered her face again, her fingers forming prison bars for her eyes to peer through.
“It’s about that boy!”
“What about the boy?” Ioletta said, knowing full well what boy Stella meant.
“I made phone calls and I went places, to try and find him, but nobody could tell me where he was!”
“Is that all, honey?” Ioletta cried.  “You shoulda axed me, I coulda tol’ ya.”
Stella looked from behind her prison bars.
“You mean it?”
“Sure, they probably sent him on one of them road gangs, you know, breakin’ rock or somethin’.  Jus’ ax Captain Odoms, he’ll tell ya.”
Stella wiped her eyes and sniffed loudly.  She felt like a fool.  “I called everywhere.  I went to the county and city jails, to the courthouse.  People laughed at me like it was all a joke!”
“Oh, don’t worry about some fool laughin’ at you.  It’s just their way, them havin’ the upper hand an’ all, thinkin’ they’re superior to the rest of us.  If you axed me beforehand, I coulda saved you all that trouble and heartache.”
“You think I should go back to Captain Odoms, ask how I can find the boy?”
“That’s the only way, honey.  He be the police, so he knows the ins an’ he be knowin’ the outs.”
“I suppose,” Stella admitted.  Sniffling, she returned to preparing the chickens, and Ioletta resumed washing her greens.
“I coulda tol’ ya the whole time,” Ioletta muttered, though whether Stella heard her over the running water was doubtful.  But there was no arguing facts--there were things some people knew and some things other people just didn’t.  It was all a matter of experience.
Stella, reflecting on her frustrating week of lunch hours, hated the thought of bothering Chance Odoms with her problems.  She just wished she had asked Ioletta for advice a week ago.  Sometimes there were answers for the asking right in front of your nose.  But she hated asking for help from anyone, anyone except the Lord, and sometimes she felt like she was bothering even Him with her troubles.
“You just hafta trust the Lord,” Ioletta said, turning off the water and shaking out a handful of greens.  She’d said it a hundred times to Stella Jo if she’d said it once, and Stella Jo had returned the favor just as often.  This time, Stella took it as a sign from Heaven.
Of course Ioletta was right, both about Chance Odoms knowing the ins and outs of things in the criminal courts system and the boy’s probable whereabouts.  With the trial coming up, Stella would have ample opportunity to speak with the boy, since the court would not want to embarrass itself by losing track of the accused.



****



Chapter 11

A beefy, gum-chewing guard, reeking of tobacco, nodded Stella to her seat in the visitation area of the county jail.
“I’m givin’ up the evil weed, ma’am,” he said, grinning and chewing at the same time.  He ran one hand over his blond, flattop haircut glistening with Butchwax.  “That’s the reason for the gum.”
The outline of a cigarette pack was clearly visible through the shirt pocket of his khaki-colored uniform.  Tempted to tell him it would be easier to give up tobacco if he threw the cigarettes away, she let her frosty glare suffice.  Sometimes that sort of tactic works wonders, especially if the one working it is a woman who tips the scales at over 200 pounds.  The guard, still grinning, brushed aside her response and waved another visitor to a metal folding chair next to Stella’s.
“Just remember no kissing or touching the prisoner through the wire, ma’am.”
The idea! Stella Jo thought.
“If you do,” he said, adding insult to injury, “I’ll have to haul you out pronto.”
“I suppose that means I’m not allowed to pass a metal file to the prisoner through the wire, then?” She retorted.
“Not funny, ma’am,” he said, losing his grin.  “I’ll have to write that in my daily report.”
“See that you do, young man, and make sure you include in there how rude you were.  I’m sure some of my friends in high places would be interested in how you run things here.”
She turned away, satisfied to have quenched his smart-alecky attitude.  He stared for a moment, his mouth open, gum poised on his tongue in surprise, then had to chuckle.  If the lady in the blue-and-white, flower-print dress had friends in high places, he was brother to the governor of the great state of Alabama.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.  Gathering up his clipboard and ballpoint pen from his desk, he noted the time from the large, round wall clock.  He made a phone call, and seconds later the door on the other side of the room opened, allowing in five prisoners dressed in the faded orange coveralls of county detainees.  One of them, a man as tall as Ioletta’s Lamarr but not nearly as trim, was in shackles and had to shuffle his way to his seat.  Mark John Davies hesitated, waiting until the others sat down.  He was in the minority here, the only white face among them.
As the man in shackles dropped into his chair with a rattle, Stella Jo’s eyes wandered to her neighbor, a woman she figured near 300 pounds and perhaps 30 years of age.  The man’s girlfriend? wife? sister?  It was difficult not to stare.  Bright red lipstick smeared the poor girl’s mouth like a bleeding wound, and her hairdo, in a vain stab at a fashionably oval Afro, had parted in the middle to form broad, woolly horns.  Stella Jo itched to get to work on her with a hairbrush.  There was a package of tissues in her purse, too, that could fix her lipstick.
“Don’t be lookin’ at me, you white b--”
“Whoa there!” The guard interrupted, grasping his clipboard like he might swat her with it, before she could finish.  For parity’s sake, he should have unsnapped the leather strap that would allow him to draw his gun from its holster.  “Y’all better not be talkin’ like that in here, lady, unless you wanna leave the room right now.”
“And you, lady,” he said to Stella, not waiting for the other woman’s response, “you seem to be a troublemaker.  I’m of a mind to see you escorted out right now, ’less you promise to change your ways?”
She nodded, smiling faintly, which was all she could muster, what with her chin quivering like it was.  It seemed every nightmare she could imagine about visiting the county jail was coming to pass before her very eyes.
Mark John Davies had found his seat and stared through the wire mesh that separated the visitors from the prisoners, smiling at this unexpected bit of entertainment.
Struggling to regain her sense of composure, she stared back, feeling at a loss for words.  She had laid down her pink patent leather purse on the white, painted countertop between the two of them, and found it difficult not to rest her elbows on it, too, like everyone else, whether prisoners or visitors, seemed to be doing.  But that would have been too much like having her elbows on the table at dinnertime, when she was unfailingly careful about such courtesies.
Looking at the boy through the wire mesh disconcerted her.  She could not help but notice that it was exactly like chicken wire, which sent all sorts of crazy thoughts through her head, none of them about prisons and their prisoners.  Meanwhile the woman next to her, the one with woolly horns, leaned closer and closer to the wire, with the man on the other side doing the same.  Suddenly, Stella noticed the wire was smudged with red, that the color exactly matched the woman’s lipstick.  There was a reason the guard had warned about kissing!
“Enough of that!” He bellowed from his desk.  “I will run you out of here, ma’am.  You know there’s absolutely no kissing or touching at any time.”
The man and woman slumped back in their chairs, both of them muttering profanities under their breath.
“I can’t wait ’til they install the dadgummed glass instead of that fool chicken wire,” the guard said.  “There’ll be no more of your messin’ around.”
“What did ya want, lady?” Mark John Davies asked.
“What do I want?” Stella Jo spluttered.  “Don’t you know who I am, young man?”
“Naw, they just said some lady visitor wanted to talk.  I was hoping you would be a lot younger.”
Stella Jo searched his eyes, looking for the faintest sign of recognition in them.  She knew he had wanted to say and a lot prettier, which she ignored.  Did his restraint say something about him, though?  Was there at least some fragment of courtesy buried in his personality?  Or was there something more calculating there?
“Why are you looking at me like that?” He asked.
“Y-you look like somebody I know,” she said.  “You aren’t from around here, are you?”
“Naw,” he said, shaking his head.  “Up north a ways, quite a bit north.  Montana.”
That explained why he didn’t have a southern accent, which surprised her, because she had expected he would.  But just because he looked so much like her Angel, she should not have assumed he would talk like everyone else.
“And you don’t recognize me?” She asked, finding it hard to believe him.  It had only been five or so months, not all that long, to her way of thinking, since he had broken her door down and almost killed her and Angel and Lamarr.  Had he been on drugs, which Chance Odoms had told her was likely, or maybe awfully drunk?  Or did criminals forget their victims that easily?
“Well, maybe a little,” he said, leaning closer and squinting faintly.  “But a lot of folks look like a lot of other folks.”
“You don’t remember crashing your car through my fence and breaking into my house?”  She didn’t add anything about a knife.
“Oh, that,” he said, untroubled and staring.  “Not really.”
“And you don’t have anything to say for yourself?”
He chuckled.  “Naw, I guess I was drunk or something.  Things happen, especially when you’re boozin’ it.”
He raised his right arm and flexed his wrist.  “I guess it was at your house some friend of yours busted my arm.  Healed pretty well, didn’t it?
“They sent me out on a road gang, cast and all,” he said, chuckling again.  “Yup, the jails down here are pretty tough.”
“Things happen,” Stella Jo repeated, not believing her ears, wondering what the boy found so amusing that he kept laughing to himself.  At the same time the sight of his upraised arm, of tattoos spilling from his sleeve, disturbed her deeply.  Her beloved Leonard had sported a couple of tattoos, one a ship’s anchor with U.S. Navy inscribed upon it, but this was different.  She had definitely seen snakes writhing around his wrist, with red tongues darting like the tongue of the devil himself.
“Is that what your parents taught you, young man, ‘Things happen’?”
“My parents?”  He turned and crossed his arms, then raised one hand to rest his stubbled chin in his open palm.  The snakes licked at his stubble.  The prisoner next to him scowled, turning him back to Stella.  “I can’t say they taught me much, being on the road most of the time.  I reckon they’re why I’m here, when it comes down to it.”
Quite frankly, Stella wasn’t impressed.  She had heard all sorts of these kinds of stories in her house on Flowers Avenue or on the street itself.  It was the liquor or the drugs.  If it wasn’t liquor or drugs, it was something else, say a father who beat his son or maybe one who neglected the son, was never around to lay his hand on him when he most needed correction.  Money was sometimes the answer, though on Flowers it was more likely the lack thereof.  Or maybe it was plain bad luck or living under an evil star.  It was never the fault of the person who found himself in trouble.
“Tell me what your parents did teach you,” she said.
“Well, they did teach me to introduce myself properly, ma’am,” he replied, smiling quickly.  “‘Hello, my name is Mark John Davies.  I’m pleased to meet you.  What’s yours, sir, or ma’am?’  Yup, I bet they told me that a thousand times.”
He grinned at her, obviously waiting for an answer.  Her cheeks flamed red at having forgotten her manners.  Maybe it was the unfamiliarity of what she was doing and where she was, or the displeasure of the guard and her set-to with the woman sitting next to her.  Or maybe she had been afraid to reveal her name, had been afraid of his reaction, even before she began her third degree of him.
“Stella Jo, my name is Stella Jo, Mark John--you prefer to be called Mark John?” She asked, purposely omitting her last name and his.  He answered with a vigorous nod.  She looked closely for any sign of recognition in his face, but saw none.  “That name doesn’t mean anything to you?”
“Stella Jo,” he said, rubbing at his forehead.  “Seems like I had an aunt somewhere up in Montana by that name.  Or no, maybe that was the lady who ran the General Store, I dunno.  That was a long time ago.”
He winked slyly.  “Could be she was my connection in Missoula.  You know, for weed, stuff like that.”
If he had meant to make her laugh, he did not succeed.
“It sounds as though liquor and drugs are all you care about.”
“My misspent youth,” he replied with a grin.  “The Army straightened me out though--that’s why I went in.  I was forced to go in at the age of seventeen.  Did they tell you that?”
She shook her head, steeling her heart against tears.
He leaned close to the chicken-wire barrier.  More quietly, he said, “Nam is where they turned me on to some really good stuff.”
“It’s time, folks,” the guard announced from his desk.  “Visit’s over, say your good-byes.”
On the other side of the room, his counterpart opened the door for the prisoners to leave.  There were groans from both prisoners and visitors.
Mark John gestured for Stella Jo to come closer, and she automatically leaned forward, one ear toward the chicken wire.
“But the best place I ever found for, you know, the stuff, is right here in jail, lady.”
“Ma’am,” the guard said.  “Ma’am! There’re lots of other folks waiting to visit, you know.”
Stella Jo looked at the wall clock, startled that 30 minutes could have passed by so quickly.  When she glanced back at Mark John, he was being hustled from the room.
“Your purse, ma’am,” the guard said.  He gestured her toward the door and began writing on his clipboard.
“Thanks,” she said gratefully, knowing she would have otherwise forgotten it.
#
Stella fished her hairbrush out of her purse even as she stumbled into the ladies bathroom.  One small tear escaped as she brushed vigorously at her shoulder-length brown hair.  She paused, staring at herself in the mirror.  Years ago, before she put on weight, she could have seen something of herself in Mark John Davies’ face.  He looked enough like Angel to be his twin, except that a soul seemed to peep out from Angel’s washed out eyes.  She wasn’t sure of Mark John Davies.  In his eyes there was more husk than anything else.
A toilet flushed, and in the mirror Stella was startled to see who emerged from the stall.  It was the same black woman she’d had a set-to with in the visitation area.  Her impulse was to bolt for it before the woman could look up from tucking her blouse back into the elastic waistband of her fuschia-colored skirt.  But Stella felt a sudden, all-too-familiar tug at her heartstrings.
“Would you like to use my hairbrush?” Stella asked.  Once she felt the promptin’, as some folks call it, she wasn’t one to hold back or to be shy.
The woman looked up with a glare.  “Somethin’ wrong with my hair?”
“I-I thought you might--” she began, suddenly unsure of herself.  “I have to ask your forgiveness.”
“Nothin’ wrong with my hair,” the woman said, grabbing the hairbrush from Stella’s hand.  She squinted at the mirror, at the two parts of her hair that leaned away from each other as if they didn’t care to be seen together on the same head.
Fumbling about in her purse, which was the size of a small suitcase, she pulled out a pair of thick glasses and pushed them onto the bridge of her nose.
“I didn’t mean to offend you back there,” Stella began again.
“Back there?” The woman said, turning on her.
Her eyes, behind the curvature of her glasses, were large black pools, so black that Stella found the pupils to be undetectable.
“In the visitin’ room,” Stella said.
The woman grasped the two parts of her hair in one hand and began teasing them with the brush.
“Was that you, messin’ in my business?”
She had not actually said business, and Stella, harking back to her years as a school secretary, sorely wanted to ask how she spelled it.  Bi’ness?  Or maybe bidness?
Resisting temptation, she said, “I just thought you wanted to look pretty.”
“Huh!” The woman shot back.  She threw the brush onto the bathroom counter and began rummaging in her purse for far more suitable implements.  She cussed, not finding them, wondering aloud how she could have overlooked transferring her brushes and combs when she changed bags that morning.
Stella Jo waited.
“Where are things when you need ’em?” The woman muttered.
“My name is Stella Jo McIlhenny,” Stella offered quietly.
“So?” She said, turning her bespectacled gaze on Stella again.
“I didn’t mean to offend, and I would like to make amends.”
“Amends?  You?”
“Yes, I’d very much appreciate your coming to Sunday dinner, Miss--” Stella said, hoping the woman would catch the hint and supply her with her name.
“Sunday dinner?” She said, her face screwing up in suspicion.  “Whereabouts do you live, Stella Jo McIlninny?”
“McIlhenny,” she gently corrected her.  “Flowers Avenue, right next to the Baptist church.”
“Hmmh.  Flowers Ave,” she muttered, softening a little.  She didn’t need to say anything about it being the Baptist church right next door for white folks.
“You wouldn’t be the mother of that cripple boy, would you, the boy who carves all them beautiful angels?”
“Why, yes I am,” Stella replied, startled that she was in the county courthouse in downtown Calneh and somebody could know her from her son’s statues.
“My name is Hermione, Hermione Tharpewood,” she said.  She reached for Stella’s hairbrush and handed it back to her.  “I accept your apology, and I will be at your house for Sunday dinner, Miz McIlhenny.”
“Please, call me Stella Jo.”
“Stella Jo it is,” she said, curtseying with her head.  She left Stella at the sink and smiled from beside the door.  “I’ll be there, Stella Jo, don’t you worry none.”
Unworried, Stella gave the mirror a grateful look and swiped at her hair with her hairbrush.  She felt much better, like a burden had been lifted from her heart, for having asked Hermione Tharpewood’s forgiveness and inviting her to Sunday dinner.  She would have to remember to buy another chicken at Piggly Wiggly on Saturday.
By the time she reached the parking lot, tears were flowing.  As much as she had been appalled by Mark John Davies, who looked so much like her Angel, she could not forget the color of his eyes.  They were the same dark, sapphire blue as her own.



****



Chapter 12

To those who don’t know Calneh in the summertime or a lot of other places in the South, especially those around the Gulf, it’s difficult to explain what 100° Fahrenheit and 100% humidity can feel like.  I don’t mean 100° and 100% humidity outside while you’re sitting inside watching TV and having your favorite drink over ice, the air conditioner blasting down on the back of your neck like a gale force wind out of the Arctic, either.  Most homes on Flowers didn’t have air conditioners back then and many of them still don’t.  Quite frankly, you would just have to be there to experience it to know what I’m talking about.
Rivulets of sweat ran like fat tears down the back of Stella Jo’s neck and disappeared into the collar of her white blouse, and you would have been sweating just as badly, or likely worse, if you had been in her kitchen that Sunday afternoon.  Ioletta Brown’s hair had lost its spring and lay in wilted coils across her forehead and the back of her neck.  Futilely, the two women fanned themselves limp-handedly as they worked, and gasped for each breath of air like their lungs were straining for oxygen through a wet sponge.  It was hot outside, but inside was like a blast furnace, with the gas oven running full bore and the four stovetop burners blazing under boiling pots.  Elephants reared in sub-Saharan Africa would have fainted dead away in that kitchen, but Stella Jo and Ioletta pressed on with their work.
Even before Stella climbed out of bed that morning, she knew the day would be hot.  She just didn’t know how hot, which prompted her to start on Sunday dinner early.  Instead of her usual, famous fried chicken cooked on the stovetop, she decided to use the oven.  She had a recipe for a brown-sugar barbecue sauce that called for a secret ingredient, a shot of whiskey, actually, so she rummaged around in the back of her pantry cupboard, a largely disorganized affair like most every other cupboard, drawer, or cabinet in the rest of the house, until she found a pint flask.
She screwed off the metal cap and took a whiff.  Strictly for medicinal purposes, like rubbing on swollen joints or pouring a little in a toddy to relieve a cough, she hadn’t touched the evil stuff in several years.  She wondered if whiskey could go bad?  But it smelled like whiskey always did, at least the few times she had ever let it come near her nose.  In any case, the flask was over a third full, enough for this last batch of barbecue sauce.  She hated using it but loved the way people raved over her secret recipe, on the rare occasions she chose to bake the chicken instead of frying it in bacon grease on the stove top.
Using the whiskey made her feel guilty.  She couldn’t buy it herself; it wouldn’t look right for a good Christian woman to enter a liquor store.  It would give people the wrong idea.  Since Leonard, like most men, had had no qualms about liquor stores and what people thought, she’d always been able to have him procure it for her secret recipes, culinary and otherwise.  But since his death, she had turned for her rare supply to the husbands of friends, not any in the Baptist church, either.
It was ridiculous, the way the men would snicker and wink, as they handed the bottle over in a brown paper sack.  She always made them promise not to tell anyone what she used it for, but she was sure they probably went right home and told the wife and all their friends.  It wasn’t a very good witness.  As she whisked the liquor into brown sugar and other secret ingredients, which included tomato juice, fresh lime juice, crushed garlic and a healthy dose of jalapeno, seeds intact, she told the Lord that this was the last time.  Mind you, she didn’t exactly promise, but knowing the scripture as she did, she knew her ‘yea should be yea and her nay should be nay.’  Usually, her word was as good as anyone else’s sworn testimony.  Better, come to think of it, the way people lie under oath nowadays, whether petty thieves or pathetic presidents.
Where was she to dispose of the bottle?  She would have to cram it into a sack with a few other things and hide it in the middle of other garbage.  She sure didn’t want Abnethy Clemon, her garbage man and Ioletta’s unbelieving neighbor, thinking wrong things about her or starting rumors.  Making someone stumble, as the scripture said, was serious business.  Who knows?  Ab Clemon might be just the tip of the iceberg--it could affect him and every one of his co-workers in the garbagemen’s union.
Pride, wanting someone to rave about your chicken recipe, was serious business, too, she admitted to herself, as she brushed sauce over the chicken pieces and then poured the remainder over both trays of chicken.  But most people didn’t think about things like that, anymore, she thought, sliding the trays into the oven, having set the racks at their proper heights.  Things often seemed worse and worse in the world.  One of Leonard’s favorite sayings, which she had always disapproved of, was that the country was goin’ to hell in a handbasket.  Come to think of it, it had been the favorite saying of a lot of folks.  And that was in the good ol’ days.
Between Sunday School and church that morning there was just time enough to sneak over to the house to switch the trays of chicken, putting the one on the higher rack at the lower position and the lower one at the higher position, to make sure everything cooked evenly.  The outside air was not yet 100°, but it was certainly over that in the kitchen.  It didn’t help that the place smelled like a booze factory, or at least what she assumed a booze factory smelled like.  By the time she fled the kitchen, she was feeling positively woozy.
She couldn’t have the place smelling like booze.  People were coming over for Sunday dinner as usual, including the young woman she’d met at the county jail earlier in the week, which meant she must cook something else to cover the smell.  A chocolate cake would do the trick, especially her double-fudge recipe.
Oh Lord, she moaned.  The house would be hot!  Why hadn’t she thought to let someone else cook the whole mess on their outdoor barbecue?
Ioletta was kind enough not to ask that same question, but then it wasn’t her house that would still be boiling hot at midnight, when she was trying to sleep.  As she walked into the kitchen, her nose wrinkled up at the oddly lingering smell.  Unable to immediately place it (since whiskey was something she always associated with her childhood and not with good Christians), she launched into bitter complaint about all the folks who brought their raw vegetables to be cooked instead of doin’ it in their own kitchens.  Of course it was terrible convenient for them, when they could pull up or chop down or break off their vegetables from the community garden outside Stella Jo’s front door and leave them on the porch.
Stella and Ioletta finally retreated to the living room to finish preparing dinner.  The heat and the humidity were simply not conducive to fellowship.  Ioletta spread a cloth over Stella’s coffee table and began chopping up cooked potatoes and raw onions and sweet pickles for potato salad.  Stella looked askance at her, but it wasn’t because she was chopping food on her one and only coffee table.  Lord knows, the coffee table was every bit as scarred as the cutting board in her kitchen, serving as it did for Angel’s project surface when the weather was too bad for him to work outside.  She didn’t care for cold potato salad to be hot potato salad, and Ioletta had just drained the boiling water from the potatoes in the kitchen sink.
“Don’t be lookin’ at me like that,” Ioletta told her.  “I know what you’re thinkin’.  I’ll shove the whole mess into the freezer for a bit before we commence to eatin’.”
“Have you looked in the freezer?” Stella retorted.
“Good day to thaw the whole thang out,” she shot back, shaking her head.  “Your housekeepin’, girl.  I bet you ain’t defrosted it in two years.”
Stella frowned, not answering, and Ioletta nodded to herself, another victory won.  She glanced over at Angel, who had come home from church and crawled straightaway into Leonard’s old recliner chair and gone to sleep.  This kind of weather always did in the poor boy.  Every once in a while, a humming sound came from his direction.  Even in his sleep, the music was in him.
Stella left for the kitchen and came back with a pot and spoon in hand, preferring to stir her cooked-chocolate frosting in the living room instead of in the kitchen.
“Took the sheet cakes out,” she announced quietly.
Ioletta gathered up the potato salad, which she’d heaped into an outsized stainless steel bowl, and made another foray into the kitchen.  She turned the flame off beneath a dozen boiling eggs, before emptying what contents she could from the freezer into the refrigerator to make room for the salad.
Looking dour, Stella came in and wedged the pot of chocolate frosting into the refrigerator, before fetching the last of the items from the stove, while Ioletta ran water over the eggs and cracked their shells.  The water from the tap was warm.  There was no cold water to be coaxed from Calneh’s water lines on this day.
Stella didn’t even glance up from her labors to complain about the smell, as Ioletta settled down at the coffee table and began peeling the eggs to top off the potato salad.
“What are you fussin’ about, Stella Jo?” She asked, finally showing her concern.
“I still can’t remember that poor girl’s name.”
“Well, we’ll know soon enough,” Ioletta said.  “The way you described her, I should think she’ll eat everything we’re fixin’ now and then some.”
“I didn’t describe her like that!”
“Well, I jus’ had the feelin’.”
“Oh, you and your feelings.”
“I don’t know why you had to go and invite somebody new, anyhow.  We have us enough people to cook for Sundays.”
“Ioletta Brown!” She exclaimed.  “I told you it was the Lord.  If I feel His leading, I follow it--just like you.”
“Sometimes you have to ask questions, make sure it’s the Lord.”
Stella couldn’t argue that logic.
“We can only feed so many,” Ioletta added.  “It ain’t like we can feed the 5,000 with two loaves and a few little fishes.”
“The Lord did,” Stella said.
“Yeah, but we ain’t the Lord.”
“Didn’t say we were.  But if we bless others, He blesses us.”
“I know that,” Ioletta said.  “You don’t have to go tellin’ me.”
“Just making sure.”
By now, both women were grinning.  Sweating from the work and the terrible heat, but grinning nonetheless.
“You still can’t remember the poor girl’s name!” Ioletta exclaimed with a hoot.
“It’s true, I can’t,” Stella confessed, laughing at herself.  She glanced over at Angel, bestirred from his nap by their sudden burst of laughter.
“Try this,” Ioletta said.  “I always go through the alphabet when I can’t remember somebody’s name.  Did it start with a’ A?  Ay, ah, uh?  How ’bout a B?  Bee, bah, buh, bo? C, soft Cee or hard C?”
“That’s pretty smart.”
“Did somebody say I was stoopid?” Ioletta demanded.
Stella was thinking, quickly running through the alphabet, knowing Ioletta didn’t expect an answer.
“I still don’t know,” she said, shaking her head.  “I was so upset that day, it just slipped my mind.”
“About the boy.”
“About the boy,” Stella admitted.  Mumbling, she quietly began repeating the alphabet to herself.
Ioletta, finished with slicing the eggs into neat circles, shoved her bowl away and threw down her knife.
“I’m done,” she declared, sitting back on the couch and wiping soggy ringlets from her forehead.  “Cain’t nobody expect more work out of me today.”
“I believe it was an H,” Stella Jo announced.
“A’ aitch?”
“An H.  Her--Hermione, I think.  Hermione--Hermione Th-Th-Tharpewood!” Stella exclaimed with pleasure.
“Hermione Tharpewood!” Ioletta wailed.  “Oh Lord oh Lord oh Lord!”
“Do you know her?” Stella asked in alarm.
“Oh Lord, oh Jesus, oh Lord, she’s invited a hooker into the house!” Ioletta cried, ignoring Stella’s question, her hands rising and falling in her excitement--a veritable Leonard Bernstein, minus the baton.
“A hooker?” Stella asked meekly.
“A hooker!” Ioletta exclaimed.  “A hooker!  Don’t you know what a hooker is?  A prostitute, girl.  You’ve lived such a sheltered life, Stella Jo.”
“Well, now I don’t know about that,” she said.  “And it’s no reason for you to work yourself into a tizzy.  The Lord Jesus ate with prostitutes.”
“The Lord Jesus!” Ioletta exclaimed, covering her face with her hands.  “Oh, now she’s blasphemin’, Lord.  Don’t-please-don’t-strike-her-with-lightnin’.”
For a second, Stella didn’t know if her friend’s paroxysms were convulsions of fear or of laughter.
“Don’t you know the Scripture?” She asked.  “Jesus forgave the woman brought to him by those awful men to cast the first stone at her because she had been caught in adultery.”
“Yes, I knows.  But he didn’t eat with her,” Ioletta argued from behind her hands.
“There was the woman at the well.  She’d had five husbands and she wasn’t married to the one she was living with.”
“But-but--”
“The Book says he ate with sinners of all kinds,” Stella finished primly.
“We won’t be sent to the bad place?” Ioletta asked, peeking out from behind her hands.
“Ioletta Brown, you tell me right this moment how you know all about this Hermione Tharpewood.”
Ioletta groaned deeply and let her hands down, where they fell limp beside her on the sofa.
“She’d be a niece of mine,” she admitted, staring straight ahead at the front door.
“Well, I’ve never heard of her or seen her before, Ioletta!  I certainly never heard you speak of the poor girl.”
“No, no,” she answered, nodding deeply.  “I keep my sufferin’ to myself.”
“Your sufferin’!” Stella cried.  “You complain as much as anyone I’ve ever known.”
“I do not!”
“Yes you do, and don’t make me call you a liar.”
“Well!” Ioletta harrumphed.  Almost, she would have risen from the sofa and fled the house, but she was hot and weary.  And there was the food to consider.  It would be wrong to waste any of it, especially Stella’s oven-baked barbecue chicken with the secret ingredient.
“While you were sufferin’, as you say, just think how her poor parents were suffering,” Stella said.  “What did it do to them, to see their daughter turning to prostitution?  And are they Christians?”
Ioletta nodded slowly.  Maybe Stella was right.
“You just sit there and tell me all about the poor girl.  You know, today could be a homecoming for the prodigal daughter.”
As Ioletta turned toward her, her eyes growing as large as saucers, Stella added, “That would be just like the Lord, now wouldn’t it?”



****



Chapter 13

Rushing in like starlings, the children of the neighborhood came first, gibbering and jabbering, darting everywhere, leaping and jumping and shouting, yielding neither to sun, threatening clouds, nor humidity, spirits undampened by the mere elements.  In sharp contrast to the children, their parents proceeded sedately to the McIlhenny house, as if with great dignity, when it was only the life-sapping weather that made them do it, drawing out sunglasses as well as sweat, and here and there either a straw hat or an ancient parasol to accompany them on the journey.
The first order of business, for parents or children, it seemed, upon reaching Stella Jo’s property, was the spreading of blankets beneath the weeping willow, until the only real shade left in the yard was on the east side of the porch or perhaps a spot behind one of Angel’s many statues.  The second order of business was the pouring of lemonade or iced tea, followed by more rounds of the same.  Then came the lure of the food hauled out to the porch, where it was piled atop Stella’s several card tables.  Naturally everyone knew the card tables, when not used for displaying an impressive array of foodstuffs, were for playing Skip Bo and Yahtzee and Go Fish, certainly not low-brow poker or high-brow bridge.  One table was dedicated exclusively to desserts, where curious eyes were surprised to see two sheet cakes (both drowning in runny chocolate frosting), especially when most people knew her favorite desserts were fruit pies of one kind or another.  Apple or blackberry or strawberry or rhubarb or cherry or peach, as long as it was fruit, it was her specialty.  Thankfully, a few neighbors were kind enough to lay out samples of their own pie-baking efforts alongside the cakes (and to leave under the table one or two cardboard barrels of vanilla ice cream picked up from the local ice cream factory), so there weren’t any objections or embarrassing questions.  Then again, maybe people simply felt too puny to ask embarrassing questions, which take more energy out of a person than the normal, everyday variety sort of questions, if they only know the difference between the two.
Maybe it was the heat, maybe not, maybe it was just the sheer number of people and the timidity that sometimes puts on a person, but no one volunteered to offer up grace before the eating could begin.  They had their paper plates and eating utensils and napkins in hand, all right, but no one was digging in quite yet, seemingly satisfied, rather, to mill around the porch or to loll on the steps.
Stella put out a general announcement, asking for someone to say thanks, at which a chorus of thanks was heard from the crowd, that terribly original variation on saying grace.  And yes, most folks still expected everyone else to laugh in response.  The children giggled the loudest, and then en masse, silence reigned supreme among them, since it is on such occasions that some child is usually selected for the privilege of praying out loud in front of God and the whole world.
Stella Jo smiled encouragingly at suddenly pale little faces, at faces withdrawing behind skirts, at faces shyly obscured by nail-biting.  No takers.  Which left the honor, the privilege, the duty, the obligation, the burden, the onus, to an adult.
Mr. Rames, Stella’s midnight waterer from over on Bowline Ave., squirming under Ioletta Brown’s harsh gaze, mistook her expression to mean that he should be the one to do the prayin’, and so he intoned one he’d learned in his youth, speaking out in a fine voice one of those table prayers any child of Catholic persuasion could recite even blindfolded for pin the tail on the donkey or while sinking beneath the waves for the third time.  In any case, Catholic table prayers being works of art, when it comes to brevity, this one impressed the gathered multitude, whether Baptists, backslidden Baptists, or the unsaved who had yet to learn they should become Baptists.
Rames beamed at the sudden attention and the appreciative words that came his way, but his pleasure was short-lived, considering Ioletta’s unrelenting frown.  Regardless, he really couldn’t have hoped for his moment in the sun to endure long--the tables of food beckoned, and everyone, much more interested in eating, “fell to,” as they say.  In short order the crowd had flocked, with the majority of the food transferred to their plates, to the blankets under the solitary, lonely willow, with scant regard paid to whose blanket was whose.
Perhaps because of the oppressive heat, there commenced a great deal of munching but little in the way of conversation.  A collective sigh went up from the assembled multitude.  The younger children, many of them taking up positions behind this or that statue on the property, ate contentedly in their own private shadows, punctuating the occasion with giggles or shrieks of delight that raised little more than eyebrows among the adults.
Mr. Rames, who’d settled himself as distantly as possible from Ioletta, while yet remaining within the generous shade of the willow, made Stella’s secret-recipe chicken his first order of business, thereby sealing his fate.  The banana peel awaited, just like it does for everyone, though some see it lying across their path, while others rush blindly on, never suspecting the day of reckoning is about to descend upon their heads.  Mr. Rames was like that, and it was because of his love for good food.  As soon as he bit into the succulent breast, its reddish-bronze skin tantalizingly crisp and the juices squirting over his tongue, he knew he’d died and gone to heaven.  It was the best whiskey-flavored chicken he’d ever eaten.
He swallowed, almost reluctant to let the morsel of chicken depart from his taste buds.  He smacked his lips.  The best ever.  Most definitely.
“Stella Jo McIlhenny,” Rames said.  All eyes turned toward him, the man of spiritual refinement, as everyone knew from his prayer of thanksgiving, and a man of culinary good taste, as they were about to discover.
“Yes, Mr. Rames?” She answered, equally unaware of banana peels and their dangers, and how they can sometimes bear down upon a person like fate’s own runaway freight train.
“That is simply the most delicious, the most superb, the grumptious bestest, the--the--” He had exhausted his vocabulary of superlatives.  Scrumptious flickered through his consciousness but was rejected because it did not have a masculine ring to it.
“Yes?” Stella smiled encouragingly.  Mr. Rames’ abandonment of midnight waterings in favor of early mornings had redeemed her opinion of the man.  She had never really held it against him that he lived a few streets down from Flowers Ave.
“That is the most wonderful whiskey-flavored chicken I’ve ever had the pleasure of eating,” he said at last.  There, the words were out.
Someone gasped.  Perhaps several someones.  Stella Jo stiffened in surprise, her mouth opening and closing wordlessly, like gills to hot air.
“Lordamighty!” Ioletta exploded.  Few mortals could have spoken with such force or admirable indignation without actually cursing.  Or spitting, either.  “Stella Jo McIlhenny is a fine Christian lady and would never touch likker.  How dare you barge in upon our friendly little picnic and accuse her of such a horrible thing?”
Two banana peels with one stone!  If Ioletta were paying attention, she would have seen that her friend Stella Jo shrank as much as the despised Mr. Rames under her withering fire.
What saved the day was a screech of tires from the street.  Every head turned, as a new, midnight blue Buick Le Sabre backed up with another screech of tires, lurched forward, then back again, in accompaniment to yet more protests from brakes and tires.  The hapless driver, invisible through the Le Sabre’s heavily tinted windows, was attempting to park.  While everyone else snickered, Rames quietly exited through Stella’s gate and approached the car.  He tapped lightly on the driver’s window.
It lowered smoothly, as only a power window can do.  A woman glared from behind thick glasses.
“Would you like a gentleman’s help in parking your car--Miss?” He asked, first glancing desperately to see if she wore a wedding band, and grateful that at the last moment she placed her left hand on the sill of the car window.  After his blunder over the whiskey-flavored chicken, he felt highly motivated about where to place his foot next in the minefield that is called etiquette.
“Why yes, that would be very kind of you--and the name is Miss Tharpewood,” she replied, her features softening with relief.
The thickset Rames, opening the door, kindly helped her out of the car.  He managed it, too, without huffing or puffing, or groaning with the strain, or even bunching his considerably heavy eyebrows.
“Thank you, sir,” Hermione said, curtseying with her head.
“You’re welcome, Miss Tharpewood,” he said.  He allowed her to reach the sidewalk so that she could watch, and then slid into the driver’s seat and effortlessly parked the car with two turns of the wheel.
She allowed him to open the gate for her, and watched with satisfaction as he waited for her to enter first.  Her head swiveled, taking in the people, the house, the statues, the crazy-quilt patchwork of vegetable gardens baking under a relentless sun.
“Lovely statues,” she said, as he closed the gate and came around to take her by the arm.
“Yes they are, works of genius,” he agreed, starting her toward the porch.  “I’m sure you would like to make a selection for your plate and join us in the shade, Miss Tharpewood.”
“Please call me Hermione, Mister--?”
“Carlos Rames,” he answered in kind.  “But my friends call me Carl.  My father hailed from Portugal.”
“Really, Carl.  I’ll be careful not to hold that against ya.”
He glanced her way and saw she was grinning.  He grinned in return, and wondered what she looked like without her glasses.
“Make sure you try some of Miz McIlhenny’s secret recipe chicken,” he said, handing her a plate.  “It tastes like a million bucks.”
“A million, really?  You have very expensive tastes, Carlos--Carl, I mean.”
He would have answered her, but Stella was coming up the stairs.
“Thank you so much for assisting Miss Tharpewood, Mr. Rames,” she said, fanning herself with a napkin.  To Hermione, she remarked, “He moves very fast, for this heat, doesn’t he?”
“Carl?” She asked, winking at him.  “Yes, it’s refreshing to meet a true gentleman in this day and age, isn’t it?”
“Carl--?” Stella began, taking a moment to put two-and-two together, before she realized Carl and Mr. Rames were one and the same.  It seemed Mr. Rames, or Carl, as Hermione had called him, really did move fast.
He recognized the narrowing of the eyebrows and sudden focus on him.  Perhaps he had said enough and done enough for one day.
“I’ll fetch us some lemonade and meet you under the tree, Hermione, but after that I’m afraid I will have to make my departure--other obligations, you understand.”
“Really?” She said, obviously disappointed.
“Do you have to rush off so soon?” Stella asked.  “No one else is leaving yet.”
He threw up a hand in apology.  “Prior obligations.”
“Well, then I guess that settles it,” she said, dismissing the matter from her mind.  It wasn’t that she necessarily wanted Carl, who was still Mr. Rames, to her, to leave, even if he had let the cat out of the bag about her secret recipe chicken.  He had said there were prior obligations, and to her mind that meant promises had been made. A man’s word was a man’s word was a man’s word.
Almost, he would have stayed, despite the professed obligations, except that he felt eyes boring into him from somewhere in the direction of Stella’s weeping willow tree.  What made up his mind was sight of Ioletta Brown emerging from the shade to make her way toward the house.
“I’ll be fetchin’ that lemonade, now,” he said.
Both Stella and Hermione watched as he hurriedly splashed lemonade into two paper cups and was on his way down the stairs.  The man really was in a hurry, ignoring the path and instead zigzagging his way past various garden plots and their guardian statues.  Stella watched anxiously, hoping he would be careful not to trample anyone’s vegetables.  Whenever someone’s plot suffered the inevitable damage, she was first to hear about it.  Complaints from injured parties sometimes made her wish she had never received the inspiration for opening her property to the neighborhood.
But divine inspiration was exactly what she thought it had been, so she persevered.  She was not one to quail when a little trouble came her way along with the leading.  She knew people sometimes turned nasty or crotchety with one another, and she could point to times in her own life when she had said or done things she was not proud of, herself.  Besides, the gardens really did bring neighbors together and helped to feed a lot of people who would not otherwise eat nearly so well.
“Your son’s statues really are wonderful,” Hermione said, her eyes following Carl’s progress across the yard.
“They are a real inspiration to a lot of people,” Stella replied.  “’Course, there are those people who stop by once in a while to ask how much we charge for a burial plot.”
Hermione turned in her direction, eyes growing larger.
“It’s okay to laugh,” Stella said.  “We do live right next to the church, and if you think about it, the place does look a bit like a cemetery or one of those monument places.”
“People are stupid,” Hermione said, with a derisive snort.  “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my life, it’s that people are stupid, and mean, and cruel.”
“That may be.  But when people come and ask me that question, it allows me to ask them if they know where they’re headed when they die.”
Hermione pursed her lips.  Instead of commenting, she looked at the plate in her hand, heaped with food, and realized she was hungry.  She delicately bit into one of Stella’s secret recipe drumsticks.
“Do you know where you’re going when you die, Hermione?” Stella asked.
“Some people say it’s hell for sure,” she answered after swallowing.  “I s’pose they’re right, the way I live.”
“I don’t want you to go to hell, and I know Jesus doesn’t want you to go there either, dear.”
A tear trickled down Hermione’s cheek.  Her legs seemed about to buckle.  To cover her weakness she went and sat down on the top porch step.  Plate in her lap, she dabbed at the corners of both eyes with her napkin.  Stella sat down beside her and patted her on the knee.
“Why you cryin’, child?” Ioletta called out, standing at the foot of the stairs.
“I-I don’t know,” she said.  “It’s just that ever since I arrived here, such beautiful things have been happenin’ to me.  First there was your friend Carl Rames helpin’ me with my car, and then there was seein’ Stella Jo’s son’s beautiful statues.  And when I bit into this whiskey-flavored chicken--it was like tastin’ a piece of heaven!”
Ioletta stared, looking from Hermione to Stella and back to Hermione again.  Surely, she wasn’t hearing right, was she?
“And then she said the name of Jesus to me.  It about broke my heart, Aunt Letta.  The only time I hear that name anymore is in a curse, or when some John is about to--I-I’m too ashamed to even tell you, Aunt Letta.  Do you think I’m bound for hell like everybody else?”
“Well I-I--” Ioletta stuttered, at a loss for words.  Could all of this have happened in the ten minutes since her niece had walked through Stella Jo’s gate?  Most times it seemed like God moved as slow as molasses in December, other times God ran so far in advance of her that it made her head spin.  And to think she had felt reluctant to even come and speak with her niece!
“Child, it seems to me the decision is yours,” she answered, tears running down her own cheeks.  “You know you been livin’ wrong, but Jesus is willin’ to forgive--to that I can personally testify.  The question is, are you willing to change your ways?”
“To pray for forgiveness and the strength to change your ways,” Stella added, giving her another comforting pat on the knee.
There was a new burst of tears from Hermione.  She pulled her glasses off and wept freely into one hand.
“All I ever wanted was for someone to love me and treat me right,” she sobbed.  “You know, like one of them knights in shining armor.  Is that so much to ax for?”
“There’s ways and then there’s ways,” Ioletta said, compressing her lips in a frown.  When Hermione’s only answer was further tears, she said, “I don’t understand how you took up hookin’.  Your Momma didn’t raise you like that, and you couldn’t of thought they was no knights in shining armor.”
“Now is not the time for haranguing the poor girl, Ioletta,” Stella chided her.  “The Lord can do His work in her heart without our criticizing.”
“But she’s right, Miss Stella,” Hermione answered, not letting up with her tears.  “She’s right, every word of it.”
“You just go ahead and cry, honey,” Stella told her.  “The work of repentance can take many a tear.”
Bursting out with a fresh wave of tears, Hermione cried nearly ten minutes more, until all Stella’s guests, children and adults alike, had fallen completely silent and began to stare in alarm.
“It’s all right,” Stella said quietly, her voice carrying across the yard.  “They’re good tears, folks.”
The crowd drifted back to their eating and talking, the children to laughing.
“I think it’s time we prayed, Hermione.  Don’t you think so, Ioletta?”
“Is that repentin’?” Hermione asked softly.
“A change of heart and mind,” Stella said.  “We’ll all pray together, the three of us, asking Jesus into our hearts and thanking him for his forgiveness.”
Hermione nodded her head that she was ready.  So they prayed, Ioletta and Stella helping her with the words, and the Lord doing his part in cleansing and saving.  Afterwards, the three of them wiped the tears from their eyes and decided to rejoin the picnic.  On the way, as they walked past Angel’s statues, Hermione expressed how she so looked forward to meeting Stella’s son.
“Oh Lord!” Stella cried, stopping in her tracks.
“What’s the matter now?” Ioletta demanded in alarm.
“Where’s Angel?  I haven’t seen him in hours!”
“The last I saw him, he was sleepin’ on that ol’ chair of Leonard’s.”
Stella turned back to the house, for all intents and purposes completely forgetting the other two women.  Hermione stared after her curiously.
“The heat’s difficult on the boy,” Ioletta remarked.  “I don’t know if she could forgive herself if something happened to him and she wasn’t watchin’ after him like she should.”
“He can’t be a boy anymore, Aunt Letta.”
“Oh, he’ll always be her boy, no matter how old he is,” she said.  She reached out and took Hermione by the hand.  “Jus’ like you’ll always be my sister’s baby--and my little girl.”
“That was a long time ago,” Hermione said, thinking maybe it really wasn’t so long ago after all.  Since praying with her aunt and Stella Jo, she felt as lighthearted and innocent as she had in childhood, like she had suddenly and unexpectedly discovered that underneath the ever-hardening crust of life, the soul of a child was breaking through to the light of day.
#
Long after everyone else had gone, taking blankets with them and the refuse accumulated from picnicking, Stella, Ioletta, Hermione, and Angel remained seated under the willow.
“Whatever happened to that son of yours?” Hermione asked Ioletta.
“Lamarr, your cousin?” 
“That would be him, Lamarr being your only son, and you my mother’s sister,” she said, shaking her head and smiling.  “Is he still handsome as ever?”
She frowned anxiously.  “Lamarr?  If he ain’t been shot up over there in Korea.”
“I don’t think we’re fighting in Korea any more, Aunt Letta.”
“Thank God,” she said.  “He had hisself shot in that Vietnam war--though he don’t talk about it none.”
Hermione grinned.  “Maybe it was in a place people don’t like to talk about, like--well, never mind.  Has he found himself a sweetheart, or is he like me, unlucky in love?”
“Last I heard,” Stella said, smiling mischievously, “he was unlucky in love right here under this old willow tree of mine.”
“Lamarr and that girl?” Ioletta asked, with furrowed brow.
“The way you told it, Ioletta, that’s what it sounded like to me.”
“What girl?” Hermione demanded.
“The Odoms girl!” Ioletta shouted, abruptly clapping one hand over her mouth.  Looking guiltily around to make sure no one else could hear, she whispered, “You should have seen him, lovesick over a skinny white girl.”
“Ioletta!” Stella scolded her.
“I’m sorry, but it’s true and I don’t like it.”
“She’s not skinny, Hermione,” Stella said.  “She has a very nice shape, and from what I know she’s a fine Christian girl, and very bright, too, a college girl, no less.”
“But not likely to marry our Lamarr,” Hermione said, grinning at her aunt.
“Child, he was a sight to behold,” Ioletta told her niece.  “You woulda thought the cat got his tongue.  We were all sittin’ here together, pickanickin’, and he couldn’t hardly say a word to the girl--and her enjoying every minute of it, I’m sure.”
“In defense of Lamarr--” Stella began.
“The boy was moonin’ over the girl,” Ioletta said.  “And her in one of those flimsy sundresses.  He hardly ate a thing, and she ate like a bird.”
“She must really be pretty,” Hermione commented.
“In defense of Lamarr, we shouldn’t be gossiping about him,” Stella said.
“In defense of Lamarr!” Ioletta exclaimed, shaking her head.
“In defense of your cousin, Hermione dear,” Stella repeated, “I am sure he was quite weary.  Maybe you heard how he saved Angel and me from certain death?”
At Hermione’s nod, she said, “Bright and early the next morning Lamarr was here to repair everything--”
“I stayed here with Angel, while she was in the hospital,” Ioletta interjected.
“The excitement was a bit much for me,” Stella explained quickly, fanning herself with a napkin and glancing over at her son.
“I should say!” Ioletta exclaimed, fanning herself, too. “That boy would have killed you all, if Lamarr hadn’t come to the rescue.”
“That was the boy I was visiting when I met you the other day at the jail, Hermione,” Stella said.
“Really!”  Her eyes seemed to grow larger behind her glasses.  She glanced over at Angel, and back at Stella, who no longer smiled.  “You know, I wasn’t looking real close, but that boy at the jail reminds me of your Angel.”
Stella’s gaze seemed focused on something across the street.  A car drove slowly by, windows down, its occupants admiring Hermione’s Buick Le Sabre.  Ioletta glanced at Hermione, then looked away.
“But what was that girl doin’ here, pickanicking with you and Lamarr, Aunt Letta?” She asked, hoping the change of subject would lighten the moment.  Besides, the story of Lamarr and the Odoms girl didn’t seem nearly finished.
“Oh, she is a sweet girl, really, when it comes down to it,” Ioletta remarked warmly, remembering how she had greeted her at the gate that day.  “I called her to see if she and her mother would join us for lunch, since her father was here helpin’ Lamarr with repairs.”
“Really.”
“Really,” she said, nodding, “and him in a suit and tie, with his gun!  I don’t think the man ever goes outside without his gun.”
“His gun?” Hermione asked, eyebrows arched in surprise.
“Yes, his gun, girl!”
“Captain Odoms is an officer of the law,” Stella said.
“Oh, that Odoms--old bloody bones himself!” Hermione laughed.  “And he was sittin’ here, eating with you all, Aunt Letta?”
“That’s right, the man hisself, Chance Odoms.”
“Well that would explain a lot, don’t you think?”
“About what, child?” She asked.
Hermione looked from her aunt to Stella.  Stella quaked with subdued laughter.  Hermione could barely contain herself.
“Captain Odoms and his gun--and Lamarr feelin’ a bit uncomfortable!” She exclaimed, finally bursting out in laughter.
Ioletta eyed her niece and Stella as they laughed and hooted together.  Even Angel, sitting a few feet away, joined in.
“Shame on you, makin’ fun of your aunt,” Ioletta said.  “And you too, Stella Jo McIlhenny, me bein’ your bestest friend and all.”
“You don’t find it the least bit funny?” Hermione said, wiping tears from both eyes, the laughter subsiding for a moment.
“I surely do not,” she replied, primly turning her gaze in feigned offense toward the street.  “And it’s not ladylike at all, either one of you, jiggling all over like that when you laugh--I should call you the Jello twins.”
Stella and Hermione stared at one another, then burst out in laughter again.  This time, Ioletta joined in the laughter, too.  When the laughter and jiggling subsided, all three wiped tears from their eyes.
“Jello twins!”  Stella hiccupped, the glee almost too much for her.
“What is that sound?” Hermione asked.
“Hiccuppin’?” Ioletta asked.  “She’s like that when she’s overstimulated an’ all, according to the doctor.”
“No, no, not that,” Hermione insisted, glancing around, straining her ears at the invisible and squinting behind her thick glasses.  To Ioletta’s alarm, she heaved herself to her feet and urgently tilted her head first one direction and then another.
“Don’t you hear it, Aunt Lett?” She demanded again.  “It’s almost heavenly.”
Ioletta listened carefully, in the meanwhile patting Stella on one arm in hopes of calming her down.
“Do ya mean the hummin’?” She asked, her face brightening.
“It’s Angel,” Stella managed between hiccups.
“Why yes, I guess it is!” Hermione said, realizing all at once that the sound emanated from in his direction.
“Oh, he always be doin’ that, child,” Ioletta added.  “He does it more often than not.”
She didn’t mention she sometimes found the constant humming grated on her nerves.  There were times when he hummed the same tune for hours on end, like he was a stuck record.  Somehow it didn’t seem right to complain, though, when mostly his music came straight out of what he’d heard in church.  Besides, it was hard to argue with makin’ a joyful noise unto the Lord, when the Book commanded it.
To Ioletta’s surprise, fresh tears sprang from Hermione’s eyes.
“It’s so beautiful!” She said, pulling off her glasses and wiping tears on her forearm.
Ioletta strained her ears to listen to what her niece was hearing.  Traffic had picked up on Flowers Ave., with the time moving on toward 7 p.m. and people headed to church.  Angel was humming Amazing Grace, but not like most people would.  Maybe what Ioletta needed was to listen to him from a fresh perspective, because she suddenly realized Hermione was right about Angel’s humming.  It was beautiful and heavenly and wonderful all-rolled-into-one, the kind of thing that puts a hush on one’s soul, makes you realize there are stages in the universe that no ordinary human can aspire to, where there may be no marquee or bright lights, but where only the truly pure in heart may come and present their devotion before God.  The sound nearly broke her heart.
As Angel’s humming continued unabated, Hermione tentatively cleared her throat, took up the tune, and began singing in accompaniment.  One usually thinks of the musician playing in accompaniment to the vocalist, but in this case the reverse would be appropriate.
Hermione’s voice was at first shaky and certainly rusty, but as she went on, her voice rising in praise, it grew stronger and stronger and the rust fell right off, until she soared with Angel’s music.  To her amazement, the words came easily, as though she had been singing them only yesterday.  People on the street, whether walking to evening services or driving by with the windows open, slowed to listen.  It was obvious she had a gift, one which she had not lost even if she had laid it aside for these past few years in the pursuit of sin.  Soon, Ioletta enthusiastically joined in, her voice not nearly as pretty but full of conviction.  And then Stella added her voice, singing sweetly along with them, following their lead, her face beaming at the world around her.
Tears washed Hermione’s cheeks.  As the rust in her voice had fallen away, it also seemed as though the crust of sin in her life had cracked, broken apart, and was being washed away by cleansing waters.
“Aunt Letta,” she said, “it’s time for church.  Do you think they would allow me in to testify, or do you think they would rather stone me?”
“Oh, child!” She said, barely able to keep her heart from leaping into her throat.  “We’ll go and we’ll find out, won’t we?  And Stella Jo and Angel can come right along.”
That’s how, one summer’s night, Stella and Angel went to Rev. Champion’s church with Ioletta Brown and testified of the prodigal daughter’s repentance and how she had finally returned to her Heavenly Father’s loving arms.  For Hermione it proved to be more than just a return; it also signaled the beginning of ministry to other women who had lost their way.  Not least of all, the choir, along with the rest of the church at Alliance Baptist, was happy to have another magnificent voice to lead them in singing God’s praises.



****



Chapter 14

The offices of the Calneh Bus Lines Co., Inc., were the same as always on Monday, which is to say like every other weekday, except that things were a little neater.  The janitors had been in, vacuumed and mopped the linoleum floors, emptied the wastebaskets and ash trays, and as usual neglected to wash the grimy windows.  Likewise, the gals Stella worked with or saw around the office were the same as always, except that Mondays were a trifle more haggard.  Considering it was the first day of the work week and them being human, they whined more than usual, especially since the heat and humidity were a replay of Sunday, and the office’s rumored air conditioning never seemed to reach as far as their desks.  In contrast Reginald Snodgrass, Head Paymaster, really was his usual self; no kinder, no meaner, just the same old, dependable, punctilious boss Stella had known these past dozen or so years since quitting the school district and beginning work for the Calneh Bus Lines Co., Inc.  Whether Monday or Friday he was the same, which everyone appreciated.  They certainly didn’t want anybody flighty and irresponsible or vindictive as their Head Paymaster.
But to Stella, the whole world seemed different.  It was as if she had awakened to a new universe, where endless possibilities lay before her.  Life was wonderful.  She was walking on cloud nine.  Her heart overflowed.  She wore rose-colored glasses.  She--well, you know, and besides, the point is that the glory of Sunday had flooded over into her Monday.  There was nothing like seeing the kind of change she’d witnessed in Hermione Tharpewood, the joy and gratitude in the woman’s eyes, and celebrating with her and Ioletta and everyone at Alliance Baptist till late in the evening.  The Book says that angels in heaven rejoice over the repentance of one sinner, but she doubted even angels could have been happier.
As anyone familiar with mountain-top experiences knows, though, they don’t necessarily last long.  For every mountain top there’s a valley, and if you don’t believe it, just go and read for yourself what happened when Jesus came down from the Mount of Transfiguration.
Under normal circumstances, maybe Stella could have expected four or five days before the sense of glory all leaked away.  But if she had no intention of descending into the valley, nonetheless it was rushing upwards, until it would find her and drag her down, leaving her only with faded memories of the way things had been--until her next dose of glory.
Towards early afternoon, the gals in the office were still marveling at her buoyant spirit, her quick laughter and little kindnesses, when an unusually tall, gray figure of a man walked into the office and scanned the room in a manner that was both quick and deliberate.
Stella saw him first and waved to him, and then he was striding down the aisle between desks to her own cubbyhole office next to Mr. Snodgrass’s.  By the time Chance Odoms reached her, a dozen pair of eyes were riveted on them both.  He bent over her, reminiscent of an eagle stooping toward its prey.  The effect was purely psychological, borne of their own fears.  Every one of them knew that face well; as the city’s top homicide cop, the news departments of Calneh’s two TV stations loved putting him in their crosshairs on a regular basis.
“Miz McIlhenny,” he said, addressing her in a confidential tone of voice.  “Captain Odoms,” she answered just as quietly.  Neither one considered it ridiculous that they had known each other for decades, yet still would have felt uncomfortable using their first names.
“I thought the courteous thing would be to tell you in person, and since I’m leaving town for a few days, this was my only opportunity.”
“Would you like to sit down?” She asked, gesturing him to a chair.  “I can bring you a cup of water--’course it’ll be one of those silly little Dixie cups, but the water is cold.”
“No, no.  I’ll only be a moment,” he said.  “I wanted to let you know jury selection began this morning and the trial start date will likely be in one or two weeks.”
“That soon?” she asked.  Too herself, she marveled how long it had been since that fateful night in March.
“Too soon for the guilty, not soon enough for the innocent,” he said, with a grim smile.
“Sometimes too soon for the innocent, too,” she remarked.
“How so?” He asked, noting her rueful expression.  He reached for the chair she’d offered and slid it close to her desk.
“Have you ever had to judge someone?”
He shook his head and leaned forward, to lend persuasiveness to his answer.  “Not something you should concern yourself with.  You’re not judging the boy, you’ll only be offering testimony as to what transpired that night at your house, to help the jury make a decision.”
“I know, but it’s like standing by, holding the coats, while everyone else does the dirty work.”
“The boy belongs in jail, he might have killed you,” he answered quickly, ignoring her reference to Reverend Johnny’s Sunday sermon on Saul, the man who became the Apostle Paul.
“We’re all guilty in one way or another,” she argued, her joy gone.
“You were guilty of sleeping peacefully in your house.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I don’t,” he said, beginning to suspect it was true.
“It’s my fault.”
“It’s not,” he insisted, certain he was again on firmer ground.  “You’re experiencing what a lot of people go through when faced with this kind of situation.  Can they put the guilty in jail and live with themselves?  Will their conscience allow them to go free while someone else pays for doing something they’ve maybe thought of doing themselves?”
Stella shook her head, obviously not in agreement.
Hurriedly, he said, “Naturally you would never consider doing what he did.  I was just giving that as an example.  There are all sorts of likely situations I could--”
“Oh, you know I won’t hold back, when it comes to telling the truth,” she reassured him, seeing the worried look on his face.  “And I’ll live with the consequences--so help me God.”
Satisfied for the moment, realizing she was serious, he rose from his chair.  “We’ll talk after the trial.  Anna Lee and I will have you over for dinner some night.”
“Thank you, Captain Odoms.  That will be fine if Angel may come along.”
“Certainly, Miz McIlhenny.  Angel will be no trouble at all.”
Afterwards, when he had gone and the gals in the office finished cross-examining her about how she knew Chance Odoms and why he would pay her a visit, she realized her sense of glory had leaked away.  On the surface she still smiled, but Chance Odoms’ visit had been like opening a door into some dark room where she was assailed by the shadows of old and distant memories. The question was, with the trial looming ahead, would she emerge from that room vindicated, or would she find her own guilt confirmed?



****



Chapter 15

Stella Jo listened in rapt attention, beginning with the court clerk’s, “Oyez, Oyez, court is now in session, the Honorable Judge Higby J. Stanglhoefer presiding...” while Ioletta promptly fell asleep and had to be nudged awake (by Stella’s well-padded elbow) every time her snoring rose above a purr and threatened to elicit the wrath of the authorities, meaning the aforementioned Judge Stanglhoefer and the court bailiff.
Come to think of it, it was probably best that Ioletta fell asleep during the opening proceedings.  That way she did not have to suffer hearing the defense’s outrageous requests for dismissal, one of them being that the real culprit was an unidentified Negro who’d beaten up the defendant and escaped before the police arrived.
“And who might this unidentified Negro be, Counselor?” Judge Stanglhoefer asked, peering down from the bench over the half-lenses of his reading glasses.
“Since I just learned of the Negro a few minutes ago myself, Your Honor, perhaps that could best be answered by the D.A.’s office.”
Hizzoner frowned, which the court appointed counsel for the defense would learn soon enough was a bad sign.
“Mr. Gravely is to carry on your case, now, Mr. Onyers?”
“If I may, Your Honor?” Prosecutor Gravely, the county’s newest deputy D.A., interrupted, which he would learn, like the defense, was not a good idea, either.
“So, Mr. Gravely, you are willing to argue your opponent’s case?” Hizzoner asked.
“No sir,” Gravely answered, “but I can explain the Ne--the black person in question.”
“Please do,” he sighed.
“The black man on the scene, it will come out in testimony, assisted the police in the apprehension of the defendant.”
The judge rested his chin in the palm of his hand.  “Mr. Onyers?”
“If that is the case, Your Honor, why has the D.A.’s office denied us the testimony of a material witness?”
“The ball is in your court, Mr. Gravely.”
“Our office has made every effort to depose the witness, Your Honor.  But as a military policeman on duty in Korea, understandably he is not readily available.  I do assure you, however, we have other witnesses, including the victim, who will testify to the guilt of the defendant.”
Judge Stanglhoefer adjusted his reading glasses on his nose and penciled a note to himself.
“Motion for dismissal is denied, Mr. Onyers.  Now, if there are no other motions?”
Onyers noisily cleared his throat.
“I hope you are simply fighting a cold, Mr. Onyers?”
“Well, Your Honor, there is one further thing.”
“What might that be?”
“It has also come to my attention that one of the city’s finest was on the scene but was not deposed.  I would hope the court would see just how irregularly the D.A.’s office is conducting itself in this case.  I mean, just how far will they go to carry out a vendetta against my client, a veteran, no less, who is guilty of nothing more than driving under the influence?”
“By finest, I suppose you mean a police officer?”
“I do,” he said.
“Since that is the case, Mr. Onyers, you should know I will brook no disrespect of the Calneh Police in my court.”
“None intended, sir.”
“Just so you know.”
“Thank you, Judge,” he said, appropriately shuffling his feet.
“Do we know the identity of the officer?” He asked, peering at Gravely for an answer.
Completely surprised by the possibility of yet another mystery witness, Gravely was about to offer his denial when Chance Odoms, sitting at the rear of the courtroom, stood up.
“I believe I can shed some light on that, Judge.”
Stanglhoefer frowned irritably at Gravely, who threw up his hands in a show of unfeigned innocence.
“If you will approach the bench, Captain Odoms.  Counsel too,” he said, gesturing for them to come forward.
“May we assume you were the officer in question, Chance?” He asked quietly, with the three men standing in front of him at close quarters.
“Yessir, I believe I am.”
“There’s nothing in the police reports about your presence there!” Gravely whispered heatedly.
Unruffled, Chance aimed his remarks at Stanglhoefer.  “In my defense, Your Honor, I arrived on the scene after the commission of the crime.  That’s why there’s no mention of my name in the police reports.  I was looking in on the McIlhennys as a friend and neighbor.”
The judge shuffled papers, searching a moment, and glanced at him over his glasses.  “You still live in that hellhole on Flowers?”
“Sure, Hig--Your Honor, I mean,” he said, barely suppressing a grin.  The hellhole he meant was the street.  A lot of people found it difficult to understand why any self-respecting white man would want to live on Flowers--the very reason he’d been able to buy the property for practically a song, upon his return from Japan in 1948.
“And you’re prepared to testify under oath?” The judge pointedly asked.
“I kept a crowd from coming into the house and then went in to assist the arresting officers,” he said, nodding his head.  “The defendant was rendered unconscious prior to my arrival.”
“I’ll bet he knows something about the Negro, Your Honor,” Onyers said.
“The Negro is a neighbor.  Unlike your client, he happens to be a real war hero and disarmed him before he could kill anybody.  If not for him, they’d be pushing up daisies in the local cemetery.”
Beside Chance, Gravely frowned to still a twitch in his right cheek.  “Your Honor,” he said, “I don’t believe this Negro neighbor is relevant, nor Captain Odoms--”
“I’ve heard enough,” Hizzoner said.  “You may sit down.  The trial will proceed.  Chance, you are to make yourself available to the court if called upon.”
“This is highly irregular--” Onyers said.
“You can put that in your appeal, Mr. Onyers.  We have our evidence and our victims.  The show must go on.”
Prosecution and defense retired to their respective seats, while Chance retreated to the back of the courtroom.  Gravely stared daggers at Chance, who let out a sigh of relief as soon as he reached his seat.  While now might not be the moment, in time the newest deputy D.A. would come to appreciate his skills as a homicide detective.
As anyone should be able to gather from Franklin Onyers’ motions for dismissal, he tried his best to defend his client, him being the counsel for the defense and all.  As for the defendant, the smart-alecky Mark John Davies visited by Stella in county lockup, he was no less so (smart-alecky, that is) in court, though he was smart enough not to brag about the availability of illegal drugs in jail.  Mr. Robert Gravely, deputy D.A., did his best to see that the accused remained in jail and was successful in that regard, although not to the degree he would have liked.  He, more than anyone else in the court, whether members of the jury or the defense, was the most surprised by Stella’s comments when her turn to testify came yet again on the third day of John Mark Davies very brief trial.
#
“I want it noted that Mrs. McIlhenny is a hostile witness, Your Honor,” Robert Gravely said, lurching to his feet.  He lurched rather than jumped or leaped because her comments were so totally unexpected that they took a moment or two to register in his brain.
This is the question asked by Franklin Onyers, counsel for the defense, that led, little by little, to the prosecutor’s lurching objection:
“Mrs. McIlhenny--what do you feel should be done to the defendant?”
Her gaze went to Davies.  Dressed for the occasion in a dark gray suit provided by counsel, in combination with being clean shaven and his shirt cuffs hiding his tattoos, he looked quite respectable.  Except for his empty eyes he was actually handsome, which to some might be a surprise considering he looked quite a lot like Angel.  But Angel was handsome, when it came down to it, if you looked at his face and did not judge by the perfection of the whole or were concerned with deformed legs.  It would help, too, if you looked past his general dustiness, earned from countless hours spent in close fellowship with Alabama hardpan.
The defendant lost his sneer when he realized Judge Stanglhoefer, as well, stared down at him over his reading glasses.
“I would hope the court--the jury, I mean, would be lenient,” she finally said, glancing from the judge to the jury box.
That was not yet the moment Robert Gravely lurched to his feet.  It’s not as rare or as unusual as one might think, quite frankly, for the victim of a crime to ask leniency for the defendant or even to express forgiveness.  The prosecutor might not like the victim’s attitude toward the defendant, but it certainly was not enough to make him flinch, much less lurch.
Onyers, on the other hand, Gravely being the first hand, had hoped to provoke a more violent reaction from Stella.  He was one of those lawyers who like to take long pauses and to pace a lot in front of the witness, to stare hard, thinking he can intimidate or rattle the opposition by such tactics.  While his client had insisted on an innocent plea, he doubted he could win freedom for him on the merits of the case.  But if he could turn the jury against the prosecution’s star witness by making her appear irrational or hysterical, he would do it.  Regardless of the merits of the case, he hated losing.
Stella’s calm answer gave him pause for a closer look.  Expecting to see her waver, at the least, instead he encountered a surprising matter-of-factness in her attitude that would, he sensed, take a great deal of arguing on his part to shake.  Naturally, there were dangers in arguing with a witness.  The judge and jury were sure to see through such a ploy and consider it as badgering.
Since even the victim felt sympathy for Davies, maybe he could elicit the same from the jury if his questions were reasonably adroit.  He decided that whatever she answered, he could make it into a so-called win-win situation for his client.
“Why would you want to petition the court for leniency, ma’am?” He asked, pitching his voice in a kindly tone.  With eyeteeth disconcertingly long and pointy, he should have foregone the smile.
Instinctively, she turned to Judge Stanglhoefer and directed her response to him.  “I feel I’m responsible for the boy’s crimes.”
A shock wave seemed to pass over the courtroom.  The immediate reaction for some was to think the witness was a nut: for others, someone who was compassionate to an extreme.  But no one had expected her answer.  Still, except for an annoyed scowl, Gravely had not yet moved.  The professional legal minds in the room, whether by experience or case histories, knew victims occasionally identified strongly with the accused.  How strongly, in her case, they did not yet know.  Ioletta, sitting at attention among a handful of spectators, felt something like electricity course through her body.  At the back of the room, on this, the third day of the trial, Chance Odoms leaned forward and cocked an ear to hear better.
“How do you mean?” Onyers asked.
“I believe he’s my son,” she answered quietly.
This is the point where the prosecutor lurched to his feet and protested.  To no avail.  Chance nodded in triumph and sat back in his seat.  Ioletta stifled a cry and wiped away a sudden tear.  The defendant, nearly as stunned as Gravely, scowled at her and cursed.
“Do you believe in God, Your Honor?” Stella asked, ignoring both Gravely and Mark John Davies.
“I object!” The prosecutor exclaimed.  “Relevance, Your Honor!”
“Oh, let the poor woman speak,” Judge Stanglhoefer said, which elicited a grin from Onyers.
“Do you?” Stella asked again, her eyes on the judge.
“God or Fate, in his mysterious ways his will to perform?” He asked, nodding an affirmative but not really answering with his mouth, a response worthy of a politician.
As unsophisticated as people like the judge and Onyers might think Stella Jo, she was not nearly so naive as to believe he had given her a straight answer.  For one, she knew the Book well enough to recognize when people were only pretend quoting it.  For another, she knew God and Fate were two very different things, if one may excuse the irreverence of calling God a thing.  For yet another, she knew when people were patronizing her, even if she did not necessarily understand why.  Her real failure, in this regard, was her inability to understand just how much the ordinary person judges others by outward appearances, in her case primarily her weight, her mismanaged hair, and the way her black dress sat upon her.
Higby Stanglhoefer took pencil in hand and began doodling on his notepad.  To everyone else in the courtroom, he looked to be taking notes.  In reality, he was only listening with half an ear, half being a charitable description.  While some people might think most men learn how to respond to a wifely tone of voice with appropriate nods and grunts shortly after returning from the honeymoon, the judge had honed that particular skill from growing up with five younger, prattling sisters.  It was handy, in a courtroom, especially in boring cases, when he wished he could be elsewhere, whether the golf course or out bass fishing from one of his three bass boats, and it served equally well when he was forced into situations where he must converse with people he felt were beneath his station.  For the moment what he wished for more than anything else in the world was a drink, preferably a shot of Jack Daniels, though he was not averse to the occasional Wild Turkey.
In the meanwhile, Stella Jo declared from the witness stand how she believed God had answered her prayers on the night in question, and then proceeded to hold forth on such subjects as the sovereignty of God, divine forgiveness, and God’s omnipotence in bringing the boy home after an absence of thirteen years--all in spite of the boy’s drunken, drugged state.  Saint Paul would have been proud of her.  Both defense and prosecution squirmed like someone had slipped itching powder into their underwear.
“Your Honor!”
Hizzoner looked up from doodling.  This time it was Onyers who made the objection, his strident tone cutting through the judge’s trancelike state.  Jerked back to reality, to hot robes and a stuffy room, where cruel fate had forced him to spend most of his past thirty summers with scoundrels who cared only about manipulating the law to their own ends, he scowled balefully.
Onyers shrank visibly, and sat down.
“Your objection is noted, Mr. Onyers,” he rasped.
Perhaps to spite his opponents, he turned a kindly face upon Stella.  While out bass fishing and enjoying a drink, he had nonetheless tuned a bit of his intelligence to the woman’s communication.  It was not unlike the millions of radio frequencies scanned nightly by the SETI Project, in which it is hoped something might be found on even one of them, indicating intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
“We have to draw this to a close, Miz McIlhenny,” he said.  Judges are sometimes predisposed toward witnesses and defendants more than anyone would like to admit, just as juries are, and for the moment he felt a sudden rush of affection toward Stella.  He wouldn’t have confessed it, but she reminded him of his favorite aunt, a childless woman now long-deceased.  How many summers had she rescued him from the poverty of his own family, taking him on vacations with her and her husband?  As the memories came flooding back, it was difficult to brush aside the images of fried chicken and watermelon, and hand-churned vanilla ice cream and fudge brownies made from scratch, and long days at the beach with wieners and marshmallows charred over an open fire.
“What happened to your boy?” He asked, dismissing his childhood daydream.  “Did you adopt him out, ma’am?”
“No,” she said, tears brimming at her eyes.
Someone in the courtroom cleared his throat, just who, it would have been difficult to say, considering the room’s poor acoustics.  Judge Stanglhoefer glared warningly over the top of his glasses at both defense and prosecution for good measure, before turning back to Stella.
“My son was kidnapped,” she said, weeping openly.
After a couple of moments and the first shock wave had passed, every woman in the courtroom, including the eight women of the jury, wept along with her.  Judge Stanglhoefer saw men surreptitiously reaching for their handkerchiefs.  Though he had a well-deserved reputation as a curmudgeon, especially summers, tears choked his own throat.  The long-buried memory of the six-year-old McIlhenny boy’s kidnapping came rushing back to him--the newspaper headlines, the citywide hysteria, and suspicions between blacks and whites that nearly erupted into violence.
The judge waited.  While most observers would have thought he was giving Stella time to compose herself, he was actually stalling until he could be sure his own voice wouldn’t break in concert with the tide of emotions cresting over his court.  To maintain control, he cast another threatening glance at Gravely and Onyers, who sat fuming in spite of the moment.
“What makes you think the defendant is your son, ma’am?” He finally asked, after clearing his throat.  He assumed Davies was not her son, that she was merely a grief-stricken woman unbalanced by the tragic events of the kidnapping.
“She’s crazy, Judge--” Mark John muttered, before falling victim to a furious glance from the bench.
“Ma’am?”
There was a stirring in the spectator seats.  “He looks jus’ like her boy Angel!” Ioletta blurted, no longer able to contain herself.  “They was twins!”
“Silence!” Judge Stanglhoefer said, pounding the gavel once.  “There’ll be no further outbursts in my court!
“Now,” he said to Stella, “is that true?”
She nodded, still unable to speak.
“Let it be noted the witness has nodded affirmatively,” he ordered the court reporter.  For himself, he had failed to recall that particular detail of the McIlhenny kidnapping, but now that he did remember it and there was the curious coincidence of Davies looking like the woman’s remaining son, he questioned what he should do with the information.  In spite of her earlier rambling disquisition on the sovereignty of God and such, it was eminently unlikely that the defendant was her long-lost son.  The world was full of people who looked like one another.
It was at that moment Onyers scraped back his chair and rose to his feet.
“Your Honor,” he said, refusing to blench under the judge’s glare.
“Yes?” He said, restraining himself from a querulous, What?
“The defense rests its case.”
Judge Stanglhoefer was not the only one thunderstruck by Onyers’ surprise move.  A moment later, it seemed everyone in the room babbled, jury included.  In the midst of the clamor, Davies leaped to his feet and screamed curses at his attorney, at Stella, at the judge, the prosecutor, everyone in the room.
“Order in the court!” J. Higby shouted over the din, banging the gavel repeatedly.  To the bailiff, he shouted, “Get him out of here!”
It took more than one officer to subdue him.  As they dragged the defendant from the room, Gravely rose and glanced at Onyers with a smirk.
“Does the prosecution also wish to rest its case, Mr. Gravely?” Stanglhoefer asked.
“We do, Judge.”
“Does anyone wish to find out if the defendant really is the witness’s son?” Stanglhoefer asked without glancing at Stella Jo.  Obviously shaken, she wiped tears from her eyes with a hanky.
“Well, I do,” he said, not waiting for an answer from either man, who in any case were not all that interested.  Onyers had rested his case because he felt the emotional moment was perfect, not because he really believed his client was the woman’s son.  Proof that Davies was not her son would only serve to prejudice the jury against his client.  For similar reasons, Gravely was not interested in proof, either, considering that proof he was her son would unquestionably drum up sympathy for the accused.
“The Court hereby directs the District Attorney’s office to determine, if at all possible, whether the defendant and the kidnapped McIlhenny boy are one and the same.  Court will reconvene Monday for jury deliberation.  Until that time, the jury is directed not to discuss the case with anyone.”
As the judge prepared to bring the gavel down, Chance rose to his feet.
“Your Honor?” He called out.  “If I may approach--?”
Judge Stanglhoefer frowned irritably and laid his gavel down.
“You may, Captain Odoms,” he said, also gesturing for counsel to approach the bench.  “This had better be short, Chance.  I would hate to find out you were more involved in this case than you’ve let on.”
Chance took a large manila envelope he’d been holding behind his back, and placed it on the judge’s desk.  The judge, shaking his head, opened the envelope and scanned its contents.  Both Gravely and Onyers fidgeted, glancing between Judge Stanglhoefer and Chance.
“Your Honor, I hope this is not information that’s been withheld from the defense by the D.A.’s office,” Onyers said.
“Chance?” Hizzoner said, resealing the envelope and laying it down.
“I’ve acted only as a friend and neighbor of the McIlhennys, Judge.”
“Mr. Gravely?”
“Don’t look at me, Judge,” he said, throwing Chance a pained scowl.  “I don’t have any more idea about what’s in that envelope than Mr. Onyers.”
“Captain Odoms has already done the legwork for your office, Mr. Gravely.  The defendant’s fingerprints match those of the kidnapped McIlhenny boy.”
Picking up his gavel, he banged it down and proclaimed the court adjourned.
“But the rest--” Chance protested, as the judge rose from his chair.
“Irrelevant, Chance,” he said.  “A crime is a crime.  Now get out of my courtroom.”



****



Chapter 16

It was 8 o’clock in the evening before Chance made it to Stella’s house.  He held the screen door aside and tapped softly on one of the front door’s frosted window panes, not wishing to disturb her and her son in case they had retired early.  After what had happened in the courtroom that day, he would not be surprised if she was in bed, exhausted and overwrought by her testimony on the witness stand.
He tapped again, and was ready to turn away, when he felt the deck shake beneath his feet.  He knew, before the door opened, it would be Ioletta Brown.
“Captain Odoms,” Ioletta stared up at him and nodded in recognition.
“Is she still awake?” He asked.
She stepped aside and motioned him in.  “We’re all out at the kitchen.  I’m sure she’ll be glad to see ya.”
He followed her through the living room, past the coffee table littered with miniature wooden angels, wood shavings, and carving tools, down a dark hallway, from which he could glance into a bathroom with its flickering candle, and finally into the kitchen, cooled by a breeze from two screened windows and illumined by a solitary bulb under the bronze-finished exhaust hood over the gas stove.
“Very nice kitchen,” he remarked, in greeting Stella and Angel.  Both were seated at the table, where a gallon jar of iced tea was set out, along with glass tumblers, lemon slices, an open sugar bowl, long-handled spoons, and pink paper napkins.
“Why, Brother Odoms, we’re so glad you could drop by,” Stella exclaimed quietly.  “But I don’t suppose you came by to inspect Ioletta’s kitchen.”
He glanced between the two women as he took a seat, momentarily taken aback at Brother Odoms.  It was the rare Sunday anyone from Flowers Baptist called him anything but Captain Odoms or Mr. Odoms.  Even Rev. Johnny never called him Brother.
“Ioletta’s kitchen?” He asked, recovering himself.
“Iced tea?” Stella asked.
He nodded, a smile at the corner of his lips, contemplating whether he should call her Sister.  Uh-uh.  Too familiar.  Too Catholic.
“I’ll fetch a glass,” Ioletta volunteered, still on her feet.
There were no cupboards above the floor cabinets with their white, formica counters, just open shelves, like in a restaurant or bar, with stacked dishes and glasses within easy reach.
“It’s really Lamarr’s kitchen,” Ioletta added.
“Ioletta’s--Lamarr’s--I thought I was at the McIlhenny domicile,” he said, drawing a laugh from the women.  Angel looked in his direction and hummed softly.  They sat across the table from one another, but Chance doubted he could really see him.
“I was over here so often Sundays--” Ioletta said.
“And other days,” Stella chimed in.
“Don’t be interruptin’ me,” Ioletta said, as she poured the tea.  “You needed help.”
“She finally couldn’t bear the disorganization,” Stella explained.
“I’ll say,” she agreed, taking a seat.  “I was sick and tired of the mess, trying to work in here and see things done a Sunday.”
“Lamarr was only in high school at the time, but he came right over and made suggestions.  The next thing I knew,” Stella said cheerily,  “he had taken measurements and brought his tools--that’s why Ioletta calls it Lamarr’s kitchen.
“Do you like the eggshell white with avocado trim?” She abruptly asked.  “I painted it myself.”
He glanced around the room.  “Very handsome,” he said.  God knew, the open shelving arrangement made sense, considering the traffic this kitchen saw, especially Sundays.  To Ioletta he remarked, “You have a good son--one to be proud of.”
“He’s the son God knew I needed.”
“And Angel’s the son the Lord knew I needed,” Stella said, with a fond pat on his arm.
“How’s your son doing in Korea?” Chance asked Ioletta, momentarily skirting the real issue behind his visit.
“Oh, the boy, he’s doin’ all right, I guess--he ain’t written lately, so I s’pose there ain’t nothin’ wrong with hisself, ’cept maybe a broken hand.”
“Ioletta, you didn’t tell me he broke his hand!” Stella exclaimed.
“Oh, go on with ya!” She retorted.  “You know I always say that about his not writin’ me.”
Enjoying their easy cameraderie, Chance stared at the women.  It was difficult to reconcile the emotional turmoil he’d seen in court that day with what he saw now.  It made him hate to mention why he had come.  But the women fell silent and gave him questioning glances.
“I suppose you know I’m not here on a social call.”
“Yes,” Stella agreed, her eyes brimming with tears.
“It’s about the boy, isn’t it?” Ioletta asked.
“I’ve seen his so-called parents,” he said.  “I thought you would want to know more about them.”
A fat tear escaped down Stella’s cheek.
“I’m sorry, if this is too painful--?”
“It’s better to know,” she said.  She dabbed her eyes with a napkin.
He nodded, acknowledging to himself that he couldn’t possibly fathom the depths of what she must be feeling or had gone through in the years since her son’s disappearance.  He could only guess what he himself might have done, if one of his three daughters had vanished as though snatched from the face of the earth.
“Are you sure?” He asked.  “You at least know he’s alive, now, and maybe it would be like picking at an old scab.”
“Scars, Brother Odoms,” she corrected him.  “Scars as ripped and torn as they’ll ever be.  The questions you have, the haunting, ceaseless questions, are the worst, knowing you should have been there to protect your child!”
He looked to Ioletta for help, as Stella broke into heart-rending sobs.  Ioletta shook her head and smiled pityingly, as she reached out and touched Stella on the arm.
“He wouldn’t come home with Angel and me!”
Chance knew the story all too well.  She was school secretary for Jefferson Davis Elementary School when it happened.  Duane refused to come home with Angel and his mother that afternoon, begging instead to be allowed to stay and play ball with his friends.  It was only six blocks from home, but he never showed up for supper that night.
“It killed my Leonard.  He didn’t die right away, but it still killed him.”
Chance nodded.  He had known Stella’s husband as well as anyone he’d ever known on Flowers Avenue, which perhaps wasn’t to say well at all.  Leonard McIlhenny had changed virtually overnight.  It hadn’t helped that Chance was a policeman, either, especially a detective, since Leonard wanted answers that nobody could give.  Thinking about it now, he realized the kidnapping had affected him personally far more than he had ever admitted.  While never much of a mixer with people outside of the police department, afterwards he had been far less willing to rub shoulders with his neighbors.  Emotional attachment too easily clouded one’s judgment.
He waited until Stella regained a semblance of her composure.
“Every day, all across the country, children make it home from school by themselves,” he said, hoping the words would give her comfort.
She dabbed her eyes again.  “I know.  Not that it helps to know that.”
“I could come back tomorrow?” He offered.
“No.  You can tell me--us, I mean, now.”
“There’s not really a lot to tell, at this point,” he said.  “But the couple who took your son have been in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons for the past four years.”
“Where they belong, if anybody ever did,” Ioletta muttered.
“Why?” Stella asked.  “Has anybody ever asked them why they kidnapped my son?”
“You want the long and short of it?” He asked.  At her nod, he said, “I met them several weeks ago.  That’s where I was headed out of town when I talked to you at your office.”
“Did they tell you anything?”
Ioletta snorted derisively.  “What they gonna tell him, Stella Jo?  ‘We done kidnapped the boy, please keep us in jail a whole lot longer?’”
“As dumb as that sounds, I’ve heard dumber,” Chance said.  He took a long drink of iced tea, before gently adding, “Especially when one of ’em is dying.”
“Dying?” Stella Jo said, glancing at Ioletta, whose eyes seemed to grow larger and rounder.
“The woman’s dying of cancer,” Chance said.  “I doubt she’ll live out the year.”
“Cancer,” Stella repeated, obviously stunned.
“God is good, isn’ He?” Ioletta interjected.  “He’s slow, sometimes, but--”
“Ioletta Brown!” Stella exclaimed, shooting a reproving glance at her.  “Do you really think God goes around killin’ people with cancer?”
“Not sayin’ He do, not sayin’ He don’t,” she said.  “You don’t think she deserves it, her and her no-good man besides?”
“Jesus said to forgive your enemies and to pray for those who spitefully use you.”
“Jus’ the same, it don’t make you feel good to know they’re gettin’ what’s comin’ to ’em?”
Stella opened her mouth, and closed it, at a loss for words.  More tears spilled down her cheeks.
“It doesn’t make me feel good at all,” she finally said, picking up her glass of tea and refusing to look Ioletta in the eye.
“It doesn’t?” She asked.  “An’ you expect me to believe that?”
Stella replaced her glass on the table without taking a sip.  “It doesn’t make me feel good because it’s a horrible thing to learn how much hate I have in my heart.”
She wasn’t finished, and Ioletta knew it.  Stella’s chin quivered violently, and for a moment, her entire body heaved with emotion.
“If I could make them know one-tenth of the torment I’ve known all these years--!”
She burst into a new storm of tears, and when Ioletta reached out to comfort her, Stella shrank away and instead threw her arms around Angel in a desperate embrace.
Ioletta rolled her eyes, and Chance shifted uneasily in his chair.  Angel, imperturbable as always, squinted over his mother’s shoulder, his humming drowned in her sobs.
Chance scraped back his chair from the table.  “I guess I’ve done enough damage for one night.”
“I’ll walk you to the door,” Ioletta said.
The return trip through the house seemed to take forever.  Chance looked glummer than usual, as Ioletta pulled the front door open for him.  Hands in his suit jacket pockets, he stared at the scarred wooden floor.
“She’ll be all right,” Ioletta told him.  “Don’t you worry none, sooner or later, she bounces back.”
“I don’t know how.”
“How?” She exclaimed.  “The Lord, man, the Lord.  Don’t you lissen at all?”
“It didn’t sound to me like you were too convinced of that a minute ago,” he said, snorting at her abrupt change of attitude.
“Good Lord!” She cried.  “That was just talk.  Somebody has to say these things ever’ once in a while.  How do you expect to hash things out between you and the Lord, ifn all you’re ever sayin’ is Yes Lord and Yessir?  A person has to let it all out, don’t she?”
“I guess so,” he said dubiously.  “I never really thought of it that way, figured it would just be sour grapes.”
“Sour grapes?  Read them psalms sometime, you’ll get the idea of it soon enough, Brother Odoms.”
There it was again.  Brother!  “I may just do that, Miz Brown,” he said, not lying intentionally.
She shook her head and clucked her tongue.  “You know what the problem is with people like you?”
He stiffened, well aware of her reputation for bluntness.
“You don’t know what it’s like, jus’ havin’ the Lord to depend on and nobody else.  If somethin’ really terrible happened to ya, I don’t know what y’all would ever do.”
He grinned.  “Just pray for me I don’t have to find out.”
“I won’t!” She retorted.  “That’s jus’ axin’ for trouble.”
He shrugged.  “She’ll be all right, though?”
“She’ll be all right.”
“You should go back.  I don’t imagine Angel’s a good conversationalist.”
“That’s right!” She laughed.  “A good ear, if ya want to do all the talkin’, though.”
He pushed open the screen door and stepped onto the porch, grateful for the balmy evening air.
“When she wants to know more, just have her call me, will you?”
“I’ll do that,” she answered.  “I suspect it won’t be long before she’ll be axin’.”
“Good evenin’, then, Miz Brown.”
“Same to you, Captain Odoms.”
He descended the stairs and took the beaten pathway to the street.  He was nearly at the gate, when she called after him one last time.
“I’ll be prayin’ for ya!”
“Thanks again for the iced tea,” he called back.  He turned one last time and waved, before he opened the gate to let himself out.
“If it’s one thing that man needs, Lord, it’s prayer,” she muttered.  “Whoo!  Do he ever!”



****



Chapter 17

On a clear October morning that threatened to be the most beautiful day of the year in Calneh, (weeks after Mark John Davies, formerly Duane McIlhenny, had been sentenced to ten years nine months in prison for his crimes), Chance sat with his wife in their back yard, enjoying an inaugural cup of tea in the brand new gazebo.  The smell of freshly dried paint was the only drawback, Chance thought, other than the matter of the tea itself and the fact he must leave shortly for work.  According to Anna Lee, tea was more cultured, more refined, than coffee, and she had resolved to educate him in its benefits.
“I’ve read it’s much healthier, Clarence,” she said, while daintily pouring him a second cup from her English tea service though he hadn’t asked for it.  “There’s too much caffeine in coffee, you know, and it stains your dentures.”
“It’s a partial,” he corrected her.  Underneath his granite exterior, he was coolly calculating a defense on behalf of his precious coffee habit.
“Same difference, Clarence,” she said.  “Coffee stains it much more quickly.”
“While you’re on the subject, I would appreciate your picking up a package of that fizzy stuff at the store for me.”
“Y-your Efferdent?” She stammered.  “You know how I detest buying anything to do with your dentures.  The clerks are sure to think it’s for me.”
“How do you think I felt when I had to pick up your boxes of--”
“Clarence, please don’t use that tone of voice,” she said, shaking her finger at him.  “It’s such a pleasant morning, and I don’t wish to have it spoiled with an argument.
“Besides,” she added, once she saw him clamp his mouth shut in defeat, “I don’t believe I ever asked you to purchase any of my feminine necessaries more than once in my life.”
The sharp glitter of her eyes warned him off from protest.  It was wiser simply to raise the teacup for another drink.  He let his gaze wander to the view of the back yard.  In contrast to Stella Jo McIlhenny’s property, which was devoted chiefly to Angel’s sculptures and to vegetables during Calneh’s long growing season, Anna Lee had laid out and executed a formal garden tended almost entirely by herself.
Her slender, firm arms were proof that she did what little mowing was required with a push mower and pruned and clipped her plants to her satisfaction with hand shears.  Perhaps a third of the yard, best viewed from the gazebo, was a sinuous knot garden, of barberry and fragrant lavender, extending to the property’s high, surrounding fence, over which she’d trained an attractive cover of ivy and morning glory.  Society being what it was in Calneh, she couldn’t very well move in the social circles she’d known as a young girl, and she certainly was not comfortable rubbing shoulders with her neighbors on Flowers Avenue, north or south.  The work, Chance knew, was her therapy from being married to the city’s top homicide cop.
Chance spent very little time in the back yard, whether with Anna Lee or by himself.  His job simply did not afford him that particular luxury.  The yard he tended was the city of Calneh, especially its seedier sections, where murders seemed to thrive like weeds.  Moving from one to the other, from the world of his wife’s formal garden into the world he knew in homicide, was a shock to the system.
He rested his elbows on the wrought-iron table’s glass top and prepared to spring the trap.  “You’ve done beautiful work, Miss Anna Lee.”
She set her teacup down and smiled coyly.  “Whatever could you be referring to, Mr. Odoms?”
He hesitated.
“Well?” She asked.
“But I still prefer my coffee.”
“Wh-why, you!” She huffed, at a loss for words.  She lifted her teacup to her lips and glared at him over its rim.
He waited, counting off the seconds.
“Coffee is for the working man,” she said at last.
“That’s me, twelve cups a day,” he said, unoffended.
She poured herself more tea.  To fortify herself for another sally?
“Tea elevates the soul,” she declared.  “The Japanese practice a beautiful tea ceremony, said to promote peace--”
“As I recall, Anna Lee, the Japs understand atom bombs better than they do tea,” he said, growing restive.  “Have you forgotten I was in that little fight on Iwo Jima and was in Japan for a year after the war?  They aren’t any more peaceful than anyone else.  Tea is a just a beverage, and I prefer my coffee.  It keeps me awake on the job, especially when I have to wrestle with all that--all that cussed paperwork.”
She drew back stiffly from the table, her eyelids rimmed with white.  In the lengthening silence, he knew he had responded with much more ordnance than necessary.  He dropped his head apologetically.
“You’re a most ungracious conversationalist, Mr. Odoms,” she said, putting her teacup down and raising her chin in defiance.  She waited for his response.
“It’s a good thing you married me for my dashing good looks, Miz Odoms,” he said, hoping for the best.
She measured the seconds.  Finally, her lips curved irresistibly into a smile.  “Well, yes, there is that.”
“I suppose I could drink tea with you here, and coffee on the job,” he said.
Her look of triumph was interrupted by the doorbell.
“I’ll see who that is,” Chance said, immediately standing.  For Anna Lee’s convenience, he had wired an additional ringer on the back side of the house years ago.  It rang a second time before he reached the steps to the porch.
“Be careful,” Anna Lee called out.
He went inside, twice patting his shoulder holster for his gun as he made his way to the front door.  Cautious for his wife’s benefit more than his own, before opening the door he checked the door’s peephole.  It was Stella Jo McIlhenny.
“Good morning, Miz McIlhenny,” he greeted her cordially.
“I hope I’m not bothering you, Captain Odoms.”
“No, not at all,” he said, resisting an impulse to ask her in for tea.  He knew instinctively that Stella would love the gazebo.  He also knew his wife was a zealous guardian of her privacy, especially that which extended to her back yard.  “What may I do for you?”
She stared self-consciously at the floor.  “I’ve made my decision,” she said.
“Your decision?”
“Yes, I want to see about visiting my Duane’s kidnappers in those jails you were telling me about.”
“Oh,” he said.  “Of course.  I wondered when you would come around to ask me that.  Please,” he urged her in.  “We’ll talk out back.  I’m sure you’ll love Anna Lee’s garden and her new gazebo.”
“That would be lovely,” she said, smiling up at him in surprise.  “You’re sure she won’t mind?”
“Mind?  She seldom has a chance to show off her gardening skills to anyone.  It may as well be you.”
Delighted, she walked in and he closed the door, automatically locking it behind them.  He led the way through the house, which was always kept museum-neat under Anna Lee’s hand, to the back door, and drew it open with a flourish, fully anticipating her wide-eyed wonder.
“It’s a little piece of heaven!” She exclaimed, her eyes drinking in the panorama of shrubs and brightly-colored flowers, before settling on the gazebo, which seemed to float in space as if it were a portal into the celestial city itself.
Spying them as they came through the door and down the porch steps, the startled Anna Lee gave Stella Jo a wan smile and a fluttery wave of the hand.



****



Chapter 18

Stella Jo went through torment to visit Mark John Davies, or as everyone now knew, Duane Everett McIlhenny, that first time in county jail.  That’s the way it is with many things in life the first time you try them, no matter how good they may ultimately prove to be.  Once you’ve passed through the initial fires of trial or temptation, a second go at it may seem like a piece of cake.  That’s the way it was with Stella, when it came to visiting Duane’s “mother” in the Federal prison, except that she wasn’t one to take anything for granted.  As sheltered of a life as some might think she’d led, she wasn’t willing to depend only on experience, when what she really needed was grace.  Visiting an inmate in the “Big House” or the “Big Rock,” as she heard so many people call the pen, wouldn’t be greatly different from the county jail, the real difference being that Duane wasn’t Mertie Davies.  She knew plenty about Duane’s early childhood upbringing, if not his later years: Mertie she knew nothing about except for what little information Chance Odoms had been able to supply.
When it came to the criminal activities for which the woman had been convicted, mostly bunco schemes, check forgery and mail theft, those spoke nothing of a violent nature.  Kidnapping was a different story altogether, it seemed to Stella.  Mertie and Bert Davies hadn’t kidnapped Duane at gunpoint, but kidnapping was commonly violent, and certainly Duane’s kidnapping had been emotionally violent for her family, not to speak of to the young boy himself.  Which all goes to say that she had good reason to believe Mertie Davies was a hardened character.  Maybe not an outwardly violent person who would’ve shot you for a few dollars, but certainly someone who was thoroughly dishonest and callous enough to rip the heart out of a family without a second thought.
That was why Stella Jo (depending on God rather than experience), prayed throughout the 5 1/2 hour train ride to Owaloosa, Georgia, where Mertie was lodged at the Federal Correctional Institution for Women.  She would have driven her Galaxie 500 and asked someone along for company, namely Ioletta, but the car was in no shape for long trips.  It was enough that it took her back and forth to work on weekdays and to Piggly Wiggly when called upon.
She would have visited Bert Davies at nearby FCI Jesup, too, except that through Chance Odoms he had refused to meet with her.  Bert Davies may have eventually admitted to fraud, mail theft and a slew of other lesser crimes, but he was not about to confess having had anything to do with the kidnap of Duane Everett McIlhenny.  As far as he knew, Mark John Davies was an orphaned nephew of his wife, whom he’d never questioned or doubted about the matter.  The boy had come to them many years before and taken on the privilege of bearing the Davies name.  When?  He couldn’t exactly say, but they had raised him as their own, housing, feeding, and clothing him out of their own pockets, without thanks from anyone.  If his wife was telling a different story now, it was about time.  He wouldn’t want to live with something as terrible as the kidnapping of a child on his conscience.  By the way, his wife’s misdeeds in the affair wouldn’t affect his upcoming parole hearings, would they?
Privately, Chance Odoms revealed to Stella that Alabama authorities were in talks with the Feds about filing kidnapping charges against Bert and Mertie Davies any day now.  Mertie Davies might escape justice through a trip to the graveyard, but Bertie, as Chance Odoms called him, hadn’t the good luck of contracting cancer.  Not yet.
Hands folded in her lap over her white patent leather purse, Stella was seated in a visitor’s alcove with glass between her and where Mertie Davies would sit once she was let in with the other inmates.  Black phones, minus their dialers, were on either side of the glass, awaiting their use.  No one had said, but she wondered if someone would monitor their conversation.  Or would they simply record it?  She couldn’t imagine someone sitting around all day, listening in on conversations between inmates and their visitors--but considering her experiences with the judicial and prison authorities so far, she wouldn’t have put it past them.  Then again, maybe they had to do that sort of thing to prevent the inmates from escaping or doing harm to one another.
Stella really did not know what to expect, as the female inmates filed in and took their places.  She had never seen any pictures of Mertie Davies and no one had provided her with a description of the woman.  She imagined a woman not unlike herself--tougher, of course, hardened looking--but now she found herself face-to-face, separated only by glass, with someone no more than half her size.  Mertie Davies, in fact, couldn’t tip the scales at 85 pounds.  It was difficult to believe, looking at her for the first time, that this frail woman had stolen her son Duane or could have wrestled him into her car without someone else’s assistance.  Frail and likely to become much frailer, she was also quite pretty.  Her prettiness, though, Stella figured, would soon fade under the ravages of cancer.
Mertie, more accustomed to the routine, was the first to pick up the phone.  “Hello,” she said, with no question in her voice.
“You’re Mertie Davies?” Stella asked, unsure, searching the woman’s bruised looking eyes.
“That’s me, none other.  You Stella McIlhenny?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Yeah, I know.”
For a few long moments, the women stared at one another, neither one smiling or frowning, like one might simply stare in the mirror to confirm she has applied the right amount of makeup or penciled her eyebrows on evenly.
“Duane’s mother,” Stella explained unnecessarily, breaking the silence.
Mertie stared blankly, for the moment not making the connection between Duane and her own Mark John Davies.
“Mark John’s real mother,” Stella said.  She had wondered whether she might break down with weeping at this point or if she would explode with long-buried rage.  Now that the moment had come, she marveled at her sense of calm.  Staring at Mertie, looking into her empty, hopeless eyes, she realized she bore no hatred for this woman.  The years of mourning over Duane, and her own sense of negligence in seeing him safely home that day, seemed to have melted away.  Suddenly, a prickly sensation ran down the back of her neck.
“What?” Mertie said.  Her eyes darted nervously, as if straining to see something or someone more than only Stella.
“They tell me you have cancer,” Stella said.  It wasn’t what she had meant to say, but once the words were out, she knew immediately that they were the words she was supposed to say.
Big tears formed in Mertie’s eyes and spilled down her cheeks.  “Nobody cares!” She sobbed, covering her face with one hand.
“That’s not true,” Stella told her.  Her heart ached to reach through the glass to somehow comfort Mertie.
“Nobody--”
“I care,” Stella said, wishing to say more, but knowing it was not quite time to do so.
“Wh-why would you, after what I did to you?” She asked, struggling to compose herself.
“I forgive you, Mertie,” Stella gently said.  “In the name of the Lord Jesus, I forgive you.”
Bursting into a new storm of tears, Mertie dropped the phone and covered her face with both hands.  Stella watched, as a female prison guard came up behind Mertie to touch her on the shoulder.  Mertie jerked aside with a snarl, and darted for the door.  To Stella’s dismay, she saw her wrestled to the ground, the prison guard placing one knee in her back to prompt her submission.
It nearly broke Stella’s heart, as Mertie cast one backward glance in her direction before being manhandled from the room.
“What did you say to her, ma’am?”
Stella Jo looked behind her and saw a guard.
“I forgive you,” she said simply.
“What did she do to you?” He asked.
“She kidnapped my son.”
“Well, she won’t be comin’ back, you know.”
“Oh,” she said, mirroring his frown.  “What do I do now?  I can’t talk to her more?”
He shook his head.  “Not today, that’s it, lady, that’s all she wrote.”
Stella cast a regretful look through the glass, and gathered herself up to leave.
“Did you ever get your son back?” He asked.
“My son?” She was startled by the question and his sympathetic tone of voice.  Duane had been a sweet little boy, if obstinate, at times, muleheaded, Leonard had been fond of saying.  So other than the muleheaded part, she guessed the answer to the guard’s question was no--he was much more Mark John Davies, the son of the woman who’d run from talking with her, than he was her own.
Reluctantly, she shook her head in answer.
“Then that’s all she wrote,” the guard repeated himself.
Afterwards, she remembered almost nothing of her trip home.  A vague recollection of catching a bus from the penitentiary to the train station, perhaps, but it might as easily have been a taxi, except she was not one to waste her money on taxis.  What she really remembered of the trip had almost nothing to do with anything she or Mertie Davies had said, and everything to do with what the guard had said: “Then that’s all she wrote.”  Curiously, though, Duane’s kidnap all those years earlier had not been the end; her giving up on his ever being returned to her had not been the end; his breaking into her house had not been the end; his trial had not been the end--none of it had been the end or all she wrote, no matter how much each had seemed exactly that at the time.  No, she was finding out that when God was involved in things, what seemed like an end was often merely a milestone in a continuing, even seemingly unending story.
Kindly having driven Stella to the train station early that morning, Rev. Willimon also collected her at ten that evening and let her off at her front gate.  Ioletta, who’d volunteered to look in on Angel, was just coming out of the house.
“Hey,” she called from the porch.
“Hey,” Stella called back.
“Did it go all right?”
Stella trudged up the steps before answering.  “All right, yeah,” she said tiredly.  “I can tell you one thing, it’s not all she wrote.”
“I don’t ’spect so,” Ioletta said.
Stella held open the screen door.  “You coming in?”
“Sure.  You want some iced tea?  I made some up for Angel earlier on.”
“Sure, if you’re having some, too.”
They went inside, and before making their way to the kitchen, Stella went over to Angel’s couch to kiss him goodnight.
“You okay, Angel?” She asked.
He smiled sleepily at her, and she tousled his hair before drawing the sheet up around his shoulders.  The night was too humid for that, and so he pulled the sheet back down and turned onto his side, with his face to the back of the couch.
“He’s okay, all right,” Ioletta said.  “He ate jus’ fine.”
“You ready for a story?” Stella asked, as they headed down the hallway.
“You sit, I’ll take care of the tea,” Ioletta told her.
She slipped off her shoes and put her swollen feet up on a chair, as Ioletta pulled the gallon jug from the refrigerator and took out ice and glasses.  She emptied a full glass of tea, Ioletta only sipping on her own, before she began to talk.
“It was the strangest thing, talking with her,” she said, which was enough to raise Ioletta’s eyebrows in anticipation.  Naturally it was not where Stella began her story.  That was only the teaser.  Anybody who knows how to tell a story knows better than to just blurt out the most exciting parts without first leading up to them decently and in order.  First she skimmed over the train ride, or tried to, except that Ioletta wanted to know what it was like to see the countryside from a shiny new observation car on the Gulf Southern.  Then she told about the differences between the visiting rooms at the county jail and the Federal Correctional Institution at Owaloosa, primarily the glass barrier, in other words, and the phones visitors and inmates had to use.  After that, she told about how surprised she had been at Mertie Davies.
“Really!” Ioletta said.
“She’s such a little bitty thing,” Stella explained.  “You could still see how pretty she used to be, too.”
“And she couldn’t have her own babies without stealin’ one of yours?” Ioletta asked, cocking her head to one side.
“I don’t know, I didn’t find out any of the whys,” she answered.  “Not the whys she would have been able to tell me.”
“Ummh,” Ioletta murmured.  “I s’pose that’s where the strange part comes in.”
“We didn’t talk more than a minute or two, I don’t think.  For a little bit I was wondering why I was there at all.  That’s when it happened.”
“What?” Ioletta asked, her eyebrows lifting again.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” she said, struggling to answer.  “She told me how she had cancer and nobody cared, and out of the blue I heard somebody talking about how they forgave her.”
“They?” Ioletta’s face screwed up in confusion.
“It was me,” she said, reaching out and grasping Ioletta’s arm.  “And then I felt the back of my neck prickle up.  I could feel the presence of God so strongly in that room, it surprised me people didn’t start falling over, me included!”
“Whoo!” Ioletta exclaimed.  “Then what happened?”
“That’s what I don’t understand,” she said.  “The next thing I knew, she was cryin’ an’ all, and they wrestled her to the floor and took her out.”
“Then what?”
“The guard told me how ‘that’s all she wrote.’  Only I knew better, just knew better in my heart, that it was just the beginning of something.  God means to do something in that girl’s heart, Ioletta!”
Ioletta drank from her glass of tea and stared over the rim, mulling what she had heard.  For a moment goose pimples rose on the back of her neck, the same, she was sure, as Stella had felt at the prison.
“What about you, Stella Jo?” She asked.  “Was that true, about you forgivin’ the girl?”
Stella nodded, her face solemn but luminous.
“But I thought you forgave her before,” Ioletta said.
“It’s different, when you’re saying it because you hope it’s true, because you want it to be true, than when God does it in your heart.  I didn’t know it was going to happen.  The words just came tumbling out of me, and I knew it was true.  It was sort of like you take this glass of tea and pour it off.  All the feelings I was havin’ drained away, leaving me calm and peaceful.”
“You didn’t hate her or nuthin’ anymore?”
“No.”
“Hmmh.” Ioletta’s eyebrows rose in thought.  She set her glass on the table.  “I s’pose I best take off.”
“Why?” Stella asked.
She sighed tiredly, and pushed her chair away from the table.  “It’s late,” she said.  “There’s things to do before I go to bed--I’ve a home of my own, you know.”
“Oh, all right.  What do you think I should do about the girl?”
“What did you plan on doing?”
“I was thinking I could write to her.  I don’t think I can go up there on the train all the time.”
“Lord knows,” Ioletta muttered.  “That train ride ain’t cheap.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Well, I’ll be praying for ya,” Ioletta said.  She stood by her chair for an awkward moment.  “Lord knows you need it.”
Stella slid her feet from the chair to the floor.
“Don’t bother yourself,” Ioletta said.  “I can see myself to the door.”
“I hope so by now,” Stella said with a laugh.  “I was just meaning to find some nice notepaper.”
“I’m gone, then.”
“All right.  Thanks again for watching after Angel.”
“I’ll walk softly.  The boy won’t even hear me.”
Stella stood at the door of her bedroom.  Her eyes twinkled.  “If you think you can.”
When she returned a few moments later with an ample supply of notepaper and her favorite ink pen, she found Ioletta standing with her back to the kitchen counter.  Hands clasped over her stomach and head bowed, she appeared lost in thought.
Stella sat at the table and wrote Oct. 11th, 1969 across the top of the page.  Her 10:30 p.m. came under that and then  Dear Mertie, in her neatest hand.  She looked up curiously.
“You still here?”
“Yup,” Ioletta sighed.
“Something you need prayer about?”
Ioletta tipped her head back and stared at the ceiling.
“Ioletta?”
“No,” she said, gathering herself up and heading for the hallway.  “Some things are better left buried, Stella Jo, and that’s all there is to it.”
Regardless of Ioletta’s profession of quietness, from the kitchen table Stella could follow her friend’s progress to the front door and hear the closing of the door behind her.  Sometimes there were things she just couldn’t argue with Ioletta.  She had known the instant their conversation seemed to open a gulf between them and knew from the sense of finality in her voice that this was one of those moments.  Following her and pestering her with questions would be fruitless.
Stella continued her letter, crossing out mistakes and making corrections as she wrote, determined to copy out the result on a clean sheet of paper.  After three drafts she had written, other than the date and time:
Dear Mertie,
I am so glad I got to meet you today.  I am just sorry our visit was cut short.  I hope I didn’t say anything to offend you, but I didn’t have the chance to ask.  Do you remember my saying how I forgave you?  I don’t want you to think that was something I was just making up.  I really meant it.  Maybe this will sound bad to you, but until today I didn’t know I could forgive you.  Do you want to know what I think?  I think Jesus helped me do it, just as simple as that.  He asks us in the Bible to forgive those who do us wrong, and I guess when it’s time to forgive, He supplies the grace to do so.  But enough about me.  What about you?  Would you like to know how to be forgiven and to start your life anew?  All you have to do is to get down on your knees by yourself sometime and tell God how you know you’ve done wrong and that you want His forgiveness.  Then tell Him you’d like Jesus to come into your heart and to take over your life.  That’s about as simple and straightforward as I can make it.  ’Course, you probably have already heard about this and just never got around to it.  Maybe you thought it was a lot harder than this, or someone made it complicated and too hard to understand?  Anyhow, I hope you do it right away.  God is waiting to hear from you, and so am I.
Your new friend,
Stella Jo McIlhenny
P.S.  If there’s something I can do for you, please write and let me know.
Wondering if she had made everything as clear as she should, she read the letter once again before sealing it in an envelope.  There was no reason to complicate the message when it was uncomplicated to begin with and this might be the only chance she had to share the Lord with her.
Feet once again propped up on a kitchen chair, Stella sat for another half hour, thanking God for the day, for Rev. Willimon’s help, for the train ride, for His presence as she spoke with Mertie Davies, for the work of forgiveness He had done in her own heart and for what she believed He had begun in Mertie Davies’ heart.  For Ioletta looking after Angel, too.  She couldn’t forget that.
There.  Her thoughts and prayers had drifted back to Ioletta.  The sight of Ioletta leaning against the kitchen counter, head tilted to stare at the ceiling for a moment as if concentrating on a speck of dust, was hard to put out of her mind.  The look in her eyes and her strange farewell were plain enough signs.  Their conversation had obviously triggered something in her friend’s heart.  She just wished she knew what it had triggered.



****



Part Four

Chapter 19

The knock on the door came at 3:30 a.m.  Rev. Champion swung the door wide and turned away without waiting to see who was on the doorstep of his house.
“Ceed, my brother, coulda been a boogler, you know.  Maybe wasn’t me after all.”
“Boogler, yeah, night rider, axe murderer,” Cedric muttered, returning with two yellow, heavy Samsonite suitcases.  “Come in and shut the door, Teddy, don’t just stand there.”
Teddy stood by the cases and rubbed his hands together for warmth.  The weather was cool but thankfully without a hint of rain, a welcome relief from the typical February in Calneh.  The nearly two-hour drive in Cedric’s black Cadillac to the Birmingham airport should be clear sailing.
“Theodora up, yet?” Teddy asked, as his brother-in-law disappeared in the direction of the bedroom.
“Up?  Hope to shout,” Cedric answered.  He reappeared with two more large suitcases and a beauty case lodged awkwardly under one arm.  “We have to leave on outta here in T-minus 5 minutes.”
“Huh, practicin’ for when you see my nephew, I see.”
“Well, now, the boy does work for NASA.  Necessary to know something of the lingo.”
“Travelin’ light, huh?”
The silvery-haired minister was breathing hard, as he went to fetch yet another case, this one a dress bag for his wife.  He draped it over the other luggage, and when he straightened back up, rubbed his hands in imitation of his brother-in-law.
”That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it, to use a few of those muscles before they atrophy.  Don’t want to see you dry up and blow away--you want some coffee?”
“Sure.”
They turned and walked through the living room and into the kitchen.  Cedric glanced at his wristwatch.  The five minutes were now four minutes.  He took the last of the coffee from the stove and poured a cup for Teddy.
“Suppose I better use up the rest of your cream,” Teddy said, opening the refrigerator.  He poured until his coffee was nearly white, the carton drained completely.  No use in saving any, since Cedric and Theodora were to be out of town for two weeks.
“Sugar in that?”
“Nah, still dieting,” Teddy said with a wink.  The Grambling Football sweatshirt he wore concealed neither his middle-age spread nor the breadth of his shoulders.
Cedric answered with a scornful chuckle, and asked, “You have our itinerary, right?”
Teddy gulped down the last of his coffee and nodded.  Theodora appeared in the kitchen doorway at that moment, dressed as though for church, black wool coat over a white-collared purple dress that reached the mid-calf, to match the formality of her husband’s black suit, white shirt, and narrow black tie.
“Ohh,” she groaned, gently rubbing her eyes.  “This is too early.”
Teddy grinned.  “Good morning, princess.”  He rinsed the coffee cup and set it in the sink beside two others.
“Baby brother,” she answered, the usual reminder that he was ten years younger than she.  “You have our itinerary, right?”
“Well, I did have it,” he said.  “Shouldn’t we be on our way?”
Cedric glanced at his watch.  “It’s time.”
“What do you mean by did?” Theodora asked her brother, as the two men squeezed past her in the archway.
“Sad story,” Teddy began.  At the front door, he picked up the dress bag and two cases.  “That darn dog, you know--doggone these are heavy.  You always tote along bricks on your vacations, sis?”
“What about the dog?” She asked, beauty case in hand.
Cedric was through the door and on his way to the car.  “Your purse, Theodora!”
“Oh, dear,” she said.  It would surely be helpful to bring money along and to have tickets to present, once they reached the airport.  By the time she returned with her purse and locked the deadbolt to the front door, the men had loaded the trunk.
Cedric held the door open to the back seat, and she slid in, handing him her beauty case.  Teddy was at the wheel of the Cadillac, the heater turned on full blast.  She heard and felt the trunk lid slammed down, and saw her husband come around and open the front passenger door.
“To the airport, James,” he said, buckling himself into his seat.
“It’s Theodore.  Not even out of the driveway and you can’t remember my name,” Teddy groused.  “Good thing I’m driving, because you probably couldn’t find the airport in the first place.”
“About that itinerary,” Theodora called from the back a few minutes later.
Teddy eyed the rearview mirror.  “I thought you were asleep.”
“You mentioned your dog--that didn’t sound good.  I hope you’re not saying that sad little Chihuahua of yours ate it.”
“Huh!” He exclaimed as if offended.  “You have no idea how vicious they can be.  Pound for pound, tooth for tooth the most--”
“The itinerary, Teddy,” she rudely interrupted him.
“I’m telling you he wrestled it away from me and swallowed it--swallowed it and then ate poor little Jonna’s homework for dessert.”  He tapped his temple with a forefinger, and added, “Good thing I had it all up here.  Rae Ann will have to write a note to the teacher for Jonna tomorrow, though.”
“Oh hush your mouth,” she muttered.
“I heard that,” Teddy said.
Several minutes later soft, ladylike snores emanated from the back seat.
“You think she’s gonna make it?” Teddy asked his brother-in-law.
“I don’t know if I’ll make it.  Hard to remember what a vacation’s like, after more than a dozen years.”
“If you’re complainin’, there’s always the bakery, you know,” Teddy said.
Cedric chuckled.  “I feel guilty enough taking a vacation.  What do you think I’d feel like if I quit the ministry to come work for you?”
Teddy laughed harder.  “Guilt wouldn’t be the problem.  Wait till you’ve swept floors all day.”
“Oh, starting me off at the bottom, huh?”
“Just like you always preach it, brother.  You hafta start somewhere.”
“Now you know why the Lord has me where I am,” Cedric said, restraining a chortle lest he awaken Theodora.  “Wife’s baby brother is a slave driver.”
Theodora, dozing in the back seat, wakened momentarily to murmur something about an itinerary.  Passing red taillights and headlights flashing by from the opposite direction tormented her dreams.  When she woke up at the airport, the harshly bright sodium vapor streetlamps were in her eyes, and a police car, lights flashing, flew by on some unknown emergency, sending a shiver down her spine.  Cedric and her brother were handing off luggage to a skycap.
“Ready, sis?” Teddy asked, as he opened the door of the Cadillac for Theodora.  He hugged her, and told her, “Don’t worry about that itinerary of yours.”
He tapped his temple with two fingers.  “You just remember, it’s all up here.”
“Dopey,” she muttered.
He grinned into her bleary eyes.  “Still too early for you, huh?”
“You just worry about the church,” she said.  “Keep an eye on things.  Don’t let everything go up in smoke just because Cedric and I aren’t there.”
“I love you too, sis,” he said, handing her off to Cedric.  “See you in two weeks--give my love to that nephew of mine.”
With loving farewells still in his ears, he slid behind the wheel of the Cadillac and drove away.  He was halfway home when he started laughing.  Dopey.  He’d forgotten her childhood nickname for him.  He chuckled, too, about the itinerary tacked to his bulletin board at home.  Unnecessarily, he thought, because except for the dates it was a duplicate of the one he and his wife had received from Mason, his nephew, when they flew to Orlando for their last vacation.  Theodora’s son was no doubt a good engineer, but he wasn’t exactly creative.  That itinerary was a virtual duplicate of one he sent to everybody who halfway threatened to visit him in Florida--ostensibly to see him and his wife but just as likely there to see the sights offered by Orlando and parts beyond.
Smart boy, that Mason, now he thought of it.  No wasted time or effort.  Make a tour of the Kennedy Space Center, see a launch, if one was scheduled.  Catch a glimpse of the construction of Disney World.  Check out Cocoa Beach.  Drive out to the Keys or up and down either coast, and return to Orlando each night.  He was an engineer.  Why not produce a “cookie-cutter” itinerary for friends and relatives, maps and driving instructions included, especially if he couldn’t necessarily go along?
#
Swinging the church doors shut, Teddy pulled at the bronze-finished handles, double-checking to make sure the locks held, and slipped the keys into his coat pocket.  Eleven o’clock on Wednesday night, yet there were people milling about the church steps and on the sidewalk.  He smiled wearily, as he passed several different groups of choir members earnestly discussing the upcoming Winter Gospel Sing.  What were their chances for a trophy?  Had they worked hard enough?  Had they pulled out all the stops?  Would the judging be as poor as last year’s?
The Sing, as most people abbreviated it, was a statewide event among the black congregations.  Many of Calneh’s church choirs, Baptist or otherwise, met each year at Alliance in a mock competition to prepare for the Sing.  All of their questions would be answered the following weekend, when they met in Selma for the actual affair.
While grateful to have had little to do with the evening’s activities (allowing him time to work on a sermon for Sunday in Cedric’s office and to lock up afterwards), Teddy felt that since it was nonetheless Wednesday night, he had passed through a storm.  Appropriately so, he thought, stepping around a puddle of standing water.  The strong winds and rains of the past two days had died down only a few short hours ago.  As he unlocked Cedric’s Cadillac for the drive home, he looked at the sky, happy to glimpse stars through the cloud breaks.
“One down,” he whispered, mentally crossing off the evening.  He grunted, as he twisted around in his seat to judge the distance between Cedric’s Cadillac and a white Chevrolet parked too closely behind him.  Maybe eight or nine cars remained in the entire parking lot, and some knucklehead still had to go and crowd its one reserved space.  He dismissed thought of it, though, as he drove away, his mind focused on three more storms he must endure in the next two weeks: Sunday morning service was first, followed by the next Wednesday night and the following Sunday morning service.  Thankfully, Bro. Wiggins conducted Sunday night services in Cedric’s absence.  For perhaps the past eight to ten years, Teddy had filled in for his brother-in-law whenever he was ministering elsewhere--which was not to say he had as yet found preaching comfortable.  The congregation was supportive but it was still a trial, likely as much for them, he was pretty sure, as it was for him.  Duty in the pulpit was a terrible burden, like finding himself saddled with a giant stone laid across his back.  Preaching made him want to throw up just thinking about it.  While the song service was in progress, prelude to the preaching or main event, as he saw it, he sometimes felt himself on the brink of weeping.  As might be expected, Cedric always said that was good, it made him depend all the more on God.
Easy for Cedric to say, when preaching for him was about as difficult as falling off a greased log.  Could be Cedric was right, though, about depending on God; after his first few stumbling sentences, Teddy usually found the words flowed from his mouth like a stream freed from a logjam.  There were even times he found himself able to go on without referring again to his notes.
If only Teddy had stayed a little longer, perhaps let the Cadillac’s heater warm up before he put the car in gear and drove from the parking lot.  Maybe then he would have seen the flicker of light in one of the church’s basement windows.  But maybe not, maybe he would have thought it was only his own headlights reflecting from the glass.  Perhaps it was simply the sovereignty of God that he didn’t see that flicker of light and go to investigate; he might have gotten killed for his effort.  But who really knows?  Maybe he could have prevented something, saved himself a lot of nasty questions, especially the kind of questions people ask themselves when it comes to if only, or what might have been, or why oh why didn’t God tell me?



****



Chapter 20

If it was someone from the Klan or some other group of that stripe who started the fire at Alliance Baptist Church, they were none saying, none bragging it up.  No one made any calls to either of Calneh’s TV stations, or to the newspapers, or any other media outlet, to take the credit.  All that was really known was that the fire was terribly suspicious.  Sensitive to the times, the Feds flew out a team of investigators from the ATF to conduct a blitzkrieg-style investigation.  One of them remarked upon the faint smell of accelerant almost right away.  After two days of sifting through the ruins, several empty cans of paint thinner were discovered scattered throughout the church basement with nearby, scorched pour marks characteristic of arson.
Channel 5’s chief (read that only) investigative reporter, Harley Beaufré, arrived at Rev. Champion’s front door Saturday morning, his favorite cameraman tagging along, ahead of anybody from the Feds or the Fire Marshal’s Office.  Under normal circumstances, Cedric would not have allowed them inside his house (in his opinion, there were far too many people trying to get their faces on TV for the sake of vanity, including and especially preachers of the gospel); under extraordinary circumstances, he felt even less inclined to allow them inside.  Seeing the two men at his white picket gate and instantly recognizing Beaufré’s face from the six o’clock news, he stepped outside to speak to them on the porch.
Harley, with an oily smile that worked on most of his victims, immediately suggested they hold the interview inside the house.  Perhaps in the living room or the kitchen?  The cameraman, habituated to acting as the reporter’s henchman, moved to step around the minister, but Cedric took a step back, blocking the way.
“No thank you,” he said to Beaufré, just like he would to any car salesman offering him a special, once-in-a-lifetime deal.
Alertly noticing Cedric’s eyes shift their focus to the street, Harley turned and saw official-looking vehicles appearing at the curb in front of the modest, shingle-sided house.
“Jack?” He said.
“Gimme a sec,” the cameraman answered, immediately setting the light stand aside and lifting his camera.
Harley didn’t waste any time on ID taglines.  The Feds were entering at the gate, clad in their navy-blue, nylon ATF windbreakers, followed by two investigators from the State Fire Marshal’s office.  He straightened his coat and tie and ran a hand through his silvery hair before glancing at his cameraman and then presenting his best profile.
“Reverend Champion, have you been told of the ATF’s determination of the cause of the fire that destroyed Alliance Baptist Church this past Wednesday night?”
Cedric plucked a snowy-white kerchief from the breast pocket of his suit and wearily polished his eyeglasses, which he rarely wore, whether preaching, teaching, or driving.  Anyone close to him in his congregation would have been shocked at the deep shadows under his eyes.  The fire officials had reached the porch, and having heard the question, glanced owlishly at one another, waiting for his answer.  More than one held pen and clipboard prepared to record his remarks.
“No, I haven’t,” he said, pushing his glasses onto his nose and expertly stuffing the kerchief back into his pocket.  A prouder or less congenial man might have been tempted to add, “But I suppose you’re here to tell me, Mr. Know-it-all TV reporter.”  Cedric only waited, allowing Harley his dramatic moment.
“They’ve concluded it was arson,” he said, instinctively deepening his voice to try to match Rev. Champion’s low, rumbling bass.  Almost, he had said the word arson with a note of triumph in his voice, but it didn’t work, not with his attempt at lowering his voice at the same time.  The overall effect was one of pompousness, a not unfamiliar association in the minds of Channel 5’s viewers, when it came to Harley Beaufré.
Wisely, Cedric looked to the ATF officials for confirmation.
“Arson!  Did you hear me, Reverend Champion?”  Harley demanded, not wishing to share the moment or the shot with anyone else.  Jack, the cameraman, often the recipient of Harley’s off-camera tirades, knew where to maintain focus.
“We have probable cause to believe it was arson,” an ATF man said, nodding and frowning as if in reluctant agreement.
Harley winced at the interruption.  Minor editing would take care of the ATF.  “Reverend Champion?” He spoke into his mike again and extended it to Cedric.
“I suspected as much,” replied Cedric with a deep sigh, aware that the man’s probable cause really meant positively beyond the shadow of a doubt.
“You did?  Were there threats upon you or your church recently?”
“No,” he said, refraining from adding, “Not from the usual quarter.”
“But you suspected arson?”
“I didn’t know,” he said.  “I just thought it was possible.”
“And that’s all?”
He nodded, not making a very good interview subject for Harley, who had hoped for a more emotional reaction.
“How soon will you be rebuilding?” Harley asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” He asked, incredulous.  “You mean depending on when the insurance money comes in, don’t you, Reverend Champion?”
“No,” he said, staring into the camera.  “There’ll be no insurance money.  The policy had--lapsed.”
Harley paused for effect.  “You mean you didn’t believe in insurance?”
“I didn’t say that,” he explained patiently, as if to a child.  “It wasn’t until yesterday we discovered there was a problem.”
Cedric wondered if anyone else could hear his heartbeat.  Briefly, he felt as though he were standing apart from the group, watching from a distance as eight white men faced a lone black man.  Cornered a lone black man, like he was the sacrificial lamb and they were wolves.  Then he heard what seemed like a group exhalation, and he came back to himself.  Ink pens were put away and clipboards lowered.
The drama of the moment was not lost upon Harley, who nevertheless felt free to manufacture drama whenever it suited his purposes.  His bushy eyebrows, as silvery as the hair of his head, rose and spread like the wings of a bird in shock.  A theatrical bird, in full plumage.  After a nearly appropriate pause, he squared himself in front of the camera.
“Shock is what I’m feeling right now, here at Reverend Cedric C. Champion’s home, surrounded by ATF agents and members of the State Fire Marshal’s office.  Shock is what I’m sure the rest of Calneh will feel when they learn of the unfolding tragedy surrounding the burning of Calneh’s Alliance Baptist Church.  I’m Harley Beaufré, Channel 5 news.”
A few moments later, Cedric found himself gratefully alone, safe from the wolves at last--and from one hyena.  He watched, able to breathe more freely, as the cars and vans left the curb, particularly glad that Harley really wasn’t very good at what he did.  A few probing questions from the reporter might have obligated him to reveal that, in the wake of the fire, the church treasurer had also disappeared.  It required no imagination to know what someone like Harley would have done with that added tidbit, linking scandal to tragedy.
As Cedric opened the door to his house, he caught sight of Theodora retreating to the kitchen.  He followed her and took a seat opposite her at the dinette.  She buried her face in a white hankie.
“It’s not your fault,” he said, reaching out to gently touch one arm.
“It is,” she answered through racking sobs.  “I had a terrible feelin’ about it--I should have told you.”
He sighed, not knowing what to say.  Ever since the phone call to them in Orlando early on Thursday morning, the words had not come easily.
“If I had just said something--listened to the Lord!” She wailed.  “But no, I had to ruin it all.  Couldn’t even let you have a nice vacation!
“And poor Teddy!” She cried, grief pouring from her like black clouds releasing a load of rain.
“You weren’t the one who lit the match, Theodora,” he said quietly.  “And I don’t think Teddy did either, baby--no one’s blaming him.”
“It is my fault,” she said.
“Oh, so you did light the match,” he said, rolling his eyes in exasperation.  Attempting to console her was more exhausting than preaching a month of Sundays.  No matter what he said or how he said it, she just seemed to dig a deeper hole of guilt for herself.  Holding her didn’t work, and not holding her didn’t work.  Speaking softly didn’t work: neither did speaking firmly.  Wiping her tears away didn’t work--nothing worked.  Not even prayer, or food.  In less than three full days, her clothing had started to loosen on her.  If something didn’t happen soon, he would have to take her to a doctor.
“There’s always a Judas, and the Lord knows all about it,” he said, speaking softly.  “You can’t do anything about it baby, and I don’t want to hear you cry no more.”
“I can’t just stop,” she protested.
“I think you can.”
“What can we do?” She wailed.  “The church is gone--your books--everything!”
“I’ve tried to tell you,” he said, his voice husky.  “It was only a building.  We’re the church--people.  We can just thank God no one was killed.”
He rose to his feet, and she looked up at him.
“What are you doing?” She asked.
“Gotta do somethin’--not this,” he said.  “Not this sittin’ around.”
She dabbed at her tears, staring after him as he left the kitchen.  It was just like a man to think you could shut your emotions off at a whim, tell your heart to quit grieving.  How many times had she told herself the very same things he had just said?  The real question, though, was what was he to do about tomorrow and all the days to follow?  What could he possibly do?  Other than Jefferson Davis Elementary, which the school board refused to rent out to religious groups, it wasn’t like there were any buildings large enough in the area for Alliance’s use.
He could have walked to the church from his house, since Flowers Avenue was only several blocks away.  But he drove, taking his black ’68 Caddy, which his beloved congregation had presented to him in celebration of 40 years of ministry.  Yellow crime scene tape cordoned off the entire perimeter of the church.  Nevertheless, he stepped over it and ascended to the concrete landing, where the oak doors had once stood.  What did this charred, ravaged hulk of wood and stone have to do with Alliance Baptist?  You might as well compare Heaven with hell!
Cedric’s intent had been to come to the church to pray and meditate about what he should do.  Now that he stood on the ash-littered landing, he realized he had no desire to linger there, to loiter, while traffic slowed to goggle-eye the scene.  Not when he had already delayed long enough in the past day and a half, whether in the company of Theodora, or in milling about the property with members of his congregation, numbly watching as the ATF did its work.  Instead he again felt the urge to do something, to move, to put plans into action.
Down from the landing, he leaned against his car, one hand on its hood, and waited for traffic to clear.  You could sell your Caddy, it occurred to him.  As he crossed the street his mind leaped at the thought.  In time he would have to replace it, but it wasn’t like he and Theodora couldn’t survive without a car for a while.  The important thing was the couple of thousand dollars he could expect from its sale, the catalyst it would be to his people to give in order to see their church rebuilt.
But even if he had sold his car yesterday, it wouldn’t have been soon enough.  He needed a building more than the cash to build one.  And it so happened he knew just the building to use, a building near enough for him and his wife to walk to, one that would least inconvenience those in his congregation who did not own cars, one that was adequately commodious for Alliance Baptist’s usual Sunday and Wednesday crowds.
Driven by a sense of renewed purpose, Cedric leapt up the steps to Flowers Avenue Baptist Church and pounded on its steel doors.  He glanced at his watch, saw it was only 10 a.m., and pounded again.  Of course Rev. Willimon, or Johnny, as he said he liked to be called, might be anywhere, but he had hoped he would be at the church.  Once the thought of sharing facilities with Flowers Baptist had popped into his brain, he hated to delay acting on it, especially since each second lost was a second closer to Sunday.
“Reverend Champion?”
Startled, Cedric swung around, instantly smiling about his mistake.  He’d glimpsed a man in blue jeans and chambray shirt, pruning shears in hand, trimming shrubbery at the back corner of the building, and assumed it was the church gardener.  Instead, it was Rev. Willimon.
“Johnny!” He exclaimed.  “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize that was you.”
The white minister glanced apologetically at his shears.  “Oh, you know,” he said.  “It’s good therapy.”
“Looked to me like you was killin’ snakes,” he said, grinning and thickening his accent.  “Problems with yo’ deacons, brother?”
Johnny stared for a moment, started to say something, and thought better of it.  Frowning, he pulled a ring of keys from his back pocket.
“That would be funny, if it wasn’t so,” he said.  “Let’s go to my office.”
Quickly sobered by the remark, Cedric followed Rev. Willimon inside.  They took a hallway off the foyer and were soon ensconced in the white minister’s sparsely furnished, bleak office.  Willimon followed Cedric’s gaze about the cold, uninviting room.
“It’s nothing like your office, l-like your office w-was,” he stammered.  “I can’t even study here.  I usually work on my sermons at the parsonage.”
Cedric stared morosely in response, and Willimon plunged awkwardly on:
“I’m sorry I didn’t call.  Didn’t call after the fire, I mean,” he said, neglecting to mention a year had passed since his visit to Cedric’s office, a year in which he had not once telephoned him.
“I wasn’t surprised,” the black minister said, without rancor.  “It’s always been that way in this city.”
“I wanted to help...” his voice trailed off.  “But I just didn’t know what to do, what to say.”
“What would you do if one of your people had his house burn down?” Cedric asked pointedly.
“It’s not the same,” Willimon answered.  He swallowed hard, searched for the right words.  “I-It’s more like, what if somebody from my family was the one who started the fire?  What could you say then?”
Cedric stared.  Things were never necessarily as easy to explain as one might think, or as complicated, either.  But the reason for the man’s awkwardness, his reticence, made more sense, now.
“John,” he said quietly, dispensing with the childish-sounding Johnny, “it was arson, but I’m sure it wasn’t anybody from your church who burned us out, even if some of your people might be old Klan members.”
“A few of my people wanted us to do something,” Willimon said.
“Your Stella McIlhenny offered us the use of her property, but that wouldn’t put us indoors.”
“The deacons--” muttered the white minister, seemingly in conversation with himself.  He spread his hands in defeat and looked miserable.
“The deacons?  Who’s the shepherd over this church, John?”
“Shepherd?  Why, I am, or I’m supposed to be.”
“Well, from one shepherd to another, my flock needs your help.  We need a building, and your church is the closest, most convenient there is.”
“You want to buy Flowers Avenue Baptist?” Willimon asked, lurching forward, elbows on his desk.
“Not buy,” Cedric said.  “Share.”
It was easy to see the thought hadn’t occurred to John Willimon.  He slumped back in his chair and brought his hand to his lips, his eyes darting back and forth, as if ideas danced in his brain like water on hot grease.
“The deacons--” he muttered.
Who’s the shepherd here, John?  Cedric wanted to say again, but held his tongue.  He had boldly thrown his request on the table and knew well enough to simply pray as the man considered his options.  He glanced around the room again, and waited.  The office felt less cold as the seconds went by.  He wondered how a handful of his salvaged books would look on the empty wall shelves.  Lonely, he guessed.
“The deacons, it’ll have to be passed by the deacons,” Willimon said at last.  “There are church bylaws, you know.”
Cedric’s eyebrows rose skeptically.
“We’ll work it out somehow,” John said.  “God as my witness.”
“Today?”
“Today?” He echoed him.
“We can’t wait on this, I have to know right away.”
“Right, tomorrow is Sunday,” Willimon said, reaching for his telephone.
“And I have to be at your meetin’, John,” Cedric insisted, pushing himself to his feet.  “Say at five?  You’ll need moral support.”
“All right, I’ll let you know, Cedric.”
It wasn’t until he reached the front door of the church and let himself out that he realized Willimon had pronounced his name correctly, as Ceed-rick.  He smiled as he strode back to his Caddy.  Things were looking up.  God was good, and he didn’t care if he had to wrestle all the deacons of hell for the use of Flowers Avenue Baptist Church.  Demons, he meant, demons of hell.



****



Chapter 21

A white automobile lurched away from the curb opposite the church and did a sharp U-turn, backing and screeching its tires before speeding away, as Cedric returned from Flowers Baptist on foot.  Just as he was about to open his car door, he heard a raspy voice call his name.
“Reverend Champion!”
He glanced around, saw no one, and heard his name called again.  Still no one he could see.  Someone playing a prank, pretending to be the voice of God, perhaps, or maybe a devil?  Then he saw a shadowy figure, secreted within the oversized pergola across the street, which served as front entrance to the old Jacob Ayers property, gesturing to him.  Chance Odoms, he realized.  He waited for a line of cars to pass by, before crossing the street.
There were two plank seats built into the pergola.  Odoms brushed dried out leaves from both with his bare hand.  Cedric sat, nearly kneecap-to-kneecap with the tall detective, staring questioningly into his eyes.  A 35mm camera, Nikon stamped across its body, hung from his neck by a leather strap.
“Any of your minister friends own a white ’69 Monte Carlo?” He asked without preamble.
“Mmmh,” he intoned, thinking hard.  “That would be Reverend Erwin--”
“Would he have anything against you?” Chance asked, anticipating his answer.
Cedric closed his mouth, clamped his lips tight.  But Chance, always the astute observer, had seen the fleeting confusion in his eyes, the shock and fear, before resolve settled in.
“I can’t say,” the minister said, his voice a deep rumble.  Hunched forward with his elbows on his knees and fingers interlaced, he pivoted toward his burned out church.  Its concrete steps lined up perfectly with the pergola’s opening.
“Maybe you never heard,” Chance continued, “but it’s extremely common for a criminal, especially an arsonist, to return to the scene of his crime.”
Cedric sadly shook his head.
“To admire his handiwork,” Chance said, rising from the plank bench.  “To gloat.”
“I can’t say that would sound like Erwin to me.”
“So you think he was here taking pictures to add to his family photo album?”
Cedric stared numbly at Chance’s belt buckle, suddenly unable to answer.
“You know, from a different angle I would’ve had a great shot of his teeth,” Chance commented, fondly cradling the Nikon in one hand.  “He has quite a smile, your friend Erwin.”
“You investigating fires, now?” Cedric asked.
“Nah,” he said, stepping from under the arch, having decided it was time to end the conversation, dubious he could squeeze any more information from him that was useful.  “The criminal mind is amazingly predictable at times, you know, so I thought I would give it a shot, see who would come sniffing around.”
“You’re the one he’s always hated,” Cedric said, as Chance turned away, intending to leave.
“Seems to me he’s maybe become a bit more democratic about his hatred, decided to spread a little in your direction, Rev.,” Chance said, idly kicking a loose stone into the gutter.  “Championing himself as the spokesman for any complaint he hears about in my investigations finally got too boring for him.”
“Hatred and unforgiveness are terrible things in a man.”
Chance gave him a tightlipped grin.  “You speaking of preachers, or cops?”
The minister stared down at his hands, and sighed.  “Oh, Erwin had it long before the call to preach, just like some have the womanizin’ in them or the greed and think the Lord’s blind and won’t notice, or that He don’t care.”
He would have reminded the detective of his role in the young Erwin’s character formation, but both men fell silent as, arm-in-arm, a teenaged couple walked past on the sidewalk and nodded to them, wistfully looking in.  Most any evening, at least while the leaves hung on and especially when the grapes ripened, young lovers could be found sitting together on these same plank seats, holding hands or making out, which was definitely not what Jacob Ayers had in mind when he built his pergola and trained the grape cordons into its framework.  After the couple, several young boys screamed by on their banana-seat bicycles, jumping from the sidewalk to the street and crossing to the church.  Machine gun noises erupted from their lips in a war game, the boys now strafing the building from the safety of their fighter jets.
Cedric wondered if he would see new flames rise skyward from the rubble.
“Was he anywhere around, when the fire started?” Chance asked.
“I don’t know--” he answered with a resigned shrug.  “You’d have to ask someone who was here.”
“Oh, that’s right, you were out of town,” Chance said, eyeing him curiously.  “On vacation.  If it was anybody else but you, I’d be thinking, ‘How convenient.’”
Cedric chuckled humorlessly.  “Is that the closest you can come to a compliment after all these years, Chance?”
The detective grinned, comment enough, it seemed.
“There’ll be no insurance money,” Cedric told him without emotion.  He felt, more than saw, Chance’s surprised reaction like some kind of psychic ripple.  “If you really want to help, you’ll find where my former church treasurer has disappeared to, along with years of insurance premiums and a young woman who was saved a couple of weeks ago.”
Chance grunted, as though taking a punch.  “The plot thickens.”  He let out a sharp whistle, and shook his head in disgust.  “You know that money’s blown by now, don’t you?  He’s probably in some Las Vegas motel at this very moment, wondering how he coulda gone through it so fast and wishing he knew what to do with the girl.”
It was Cedric’s turn to shake his head in disgust.  “You won’t let on to anyone, I hope.  My congregation doesn’t know yet.”
“All right,” he said quietly, nodding assent.  “You should know, bye the bye, sooner or later, the FBI might stick their nose into this--church bombings and arsons being high on their list.”
“For the moment,” Cedric muttered, unimpressed.
“Anyone I could talk to who was here last Wednesday?”
“My brother-in-law, Teddy Exner.  He was the one who locked up the church Wednesday night.  He might remember something useful.  God knows, he needs somebody to talk to him about it.”
Chance nodded, said, “We-ell, could be my bit of digging will turn up more dirt.”
“Dirt?  Is that what you call it?”
“Sure, it’s all dirt, when it comes to killing people or burning down churches, isn’t it?”
Cedric watched as Chance walked away, toward his house, gears turning in the man’s head.  He sighed, deep gloom settling over him.  Except for the ice that seemed to have congealed about his heart, he would have returned immediately to his car.  It was close to noon and Theodora expected him home for lunch.
How he wished John Willimon’s suspicions could be right about some unknown white, Klansman or otherwise, having torched his church!  But Erwin?  The truth was, something deep in his heart feared that Chance Odoms was right about him.  It was difficult to forget the younger minister’s reaction to Lamarr’s comments about Chance Odoms:
“That boy’s an impertinent nigger, ain’t he?” Erwin remarked bitterly, as Rev. Champion returned from seeing Lamarr out of the church.
He frowned, holding his temper in check.  “Brother, don’t you think we hear enough of that from other people, without calling each other names?”
“You would defend him, you hypocrite!” Erwin sneered.  “Just like you would your beloved girlfriend, the almighty Chance Odoms.”
Cedric raised an eyebrow in answer and resumed his seat behind his desk.  The other minister’s eyes bulged with rage, the arteries in his neck throbbing.
“Well?” Erwin demanded.
“Hatred will eat away your soul like cancer, brother,” he said, his own temper completely under control.  To himself, he acknowledged it must be Holy Ghost restraint that prevented him from snapping the scrawny Erwin in two.
Erwin sputtered, unable to form words recognizable as speech, except that anyone could sense they dripped with poison.
“Can’t you see the door you open in yourself for the devil to come in?”
“One good sermon--!” Erwin managed to spit out, rushing the desk and pounding it with both fists.  “One good sermon you’re famous for and you think you can tell me what to do!”
Cedric reflexively reached out and caught a white bud vase, with its single red rose, from nearly careering off his desk.  At the same time, a scripture verse ran through his mind, fortifying his resolve not to retaliate:  “A soft answer turns away wrath.  A soft answer turns away wrath.  A soft answer--”
Erwin could bear it no longer, sight of his mild, compassionate demeanor.  Flecks of white foam flew from his lips.  His body jerked into motion, carrying him from the office and toward the front doors, where he seemed to catapult himself from the building and onto the sidewalk.
Cedric reached the doors in time to see Erwin’s white Monte Carlo peel away from the curb and speed off down the street.  It was months before their paths crossed again, and when they did, Erwin said nothing of what had transpired that day at Alliance Baptist.  It was as if an epileptic seizure had come and gone without leaving a ripple on the surface of his memory.
If Chance Odoms was right, he had remembered all too well; the Monte Carlo parked at the church not half an hour ago was the same white car Cedric recalled seeing Erwin drive away in a fit of rage.  Fleetingly, he wondered if he should have body slammed Erwin to the floor that day and beat the devil out of him.  Maybe he would be at work in his church office right now instead of sitting on a bench in a dilapidated old pergola.
No, he thought to himself, rising and dusting off the seat of his pants.  He hustled across the street, barely making it to his car ahead of a cloudburst.  As he turned on the windshield wipers, he remembered the sense of peace he’d felt that day, in not striking out at Erwin, and knew it was the Holy Ghost who’d directed his response.  Just because the results were not what he would have preferred, given the choice, did not mean he had mistaken God’s leading.  He had done what he was supposed to, while Erwin had done what the devil and the flesh had told him to do.  The next step was the Lord’s, and as for himself he would follow it; it didn’t matter if anybody else understood or not.
The world would never understand such thinking, and neither would much of the church.  In fact he wasn’t sure he would understand it himself, when tomorrow rolled around.  But for the moment, he had crystal clear vision of one thing; God was behind it all, saw all, knew all, understood all, and could be trusted completely, no matter what one saw with one’s eyes.  If no one else shared in that vision, he pitied their blindness.



****



Chapter 22

Streaks of rust ran like tears down Flowers Baptist’s front doors.  Old mud dauber nests littered the white eaves with splotches of ochre.  White eaves?  Cedric looked closer to see if his eyes were deceiving him.  While the eaves were white, the rest of the exterior was beige with brown trim to match the steel doors.  Whoever had painted the building had no sense of pride, evidently figuring it was perfectly fine to do as little as possible, as cheaply as possible.  Flowers Baptist seemed to call out to him, begging to be cleaned and painted.
Glancing down at his watch, he wondered to himself how anyone could preach honoring the Lord in everything yet show such a shabby face to the world.  Money was the easy answer, which he knew all too well, followed by the fact that a lot of church members wouldn’t tithe, which he also knew all too well.
Five minutes passed, with Cedric knocking intermittently at the door, time enough to determine what improvements should be made to Flowers Baptist to make it an inviting place for worship.  Still, at ten minutes after five, there was no sign of Rev. Willimon.  Had Johnny and his deacons convened their meeting and were pointedly excluding him?  Was that why the man hadn’t answered his phone calls?
Deeply discouraged, Cedric wondered if Calneh’s cloudy skies hid something he really didn’t wish to see--God’s thumb descending from the heavens above.  Had he grown proud with success and God was trying to get his attention?  Was that what this was all about?  Was that why he had lost his church, had it stripped from him by the hand of God, even if gloved by someone’s guilty arson?  Now God hammered at his pride, as he, Cedric C. Champion, went hat in hand, begging for help from people who had never so much as given him the time of day?
Giving up in defeat, Cedric trudged around the corner of the building, to its Bougainvillea Street side.  The lights were burning in John’s office.  He saw them through the windows.  He reached above his head and knocked on the glass.  When there was no response, he shouted Willimon’s name.
Was the man deaf?  Had he died of a heart attack?  Was he, along with his board of deacons, rudely ignoring him?  Were they huddled in a corner, hiding from him?  Though 68 years old, he felt tempted to jump up, see if he could peek through the glass.  There must be something he could stand on, maybe a ladder inadvertently left outside?
Conscious of the passing traffic and inquisitive stares, he decided to try the parsonage, which was further on down Bougainvillea, just past the church.  As he made his way along the fence to the gate (the pickets matched the church’s brown trim), he wished he had phoned Willimon at his home before bruising his knuckles on the church’s steel doors.  It could be the man had simply neglected to turn out his office lights.
Halfway up the flagstone path to the house, he saw the front door unexpectedly fly open.  A young blonde woman, a baby crying in her arms, rushed out to meet him.
“Oh, thank God it’s you, Reverend Champion!”
“Is something wrong with your baby?” He asked, instantly alarmed.
“No, no!” She said, on impulse reaching out with one hand to touch his arm.  “But Johnny was called to the hospital on account of one of our people having a heart attack and all, and I just now had a call from my neighbor, that something terrible’s happened to her son.”
“Who?” He asked.
“Sister McIlhenny,” she said.  “She sounded awfully scared--something about Angel put his eye out.”
He ran for the gate, with no thought of thanks or goodbye, or a glance behind him, and no thought at all, other than a single drawn out prayer for help, until he reached the McIlhenny’s and ran into their yard.
Angel’s voice pierced the air with heartrending shrieks.  Stella, or Sister McIlhenny as he usually addressed her, was bent over him, struggling with him while he thrashed beside one of his statues.
“Brother Angel!” He said, addressing him in a commanding voice.  “You must lie still, son, and keep your hands away from your eyes.”
Stella looked up, startled to find him standing there.  Angel, as though hearing the voice of God, immediately lay inertly on the ground, letting his hands fall to his sides, his shrieks reduced to awful groans.
“Sister, go call the hospital.  Tell them we’re bringing the boy into Emergency.”
“But--but--” she stammered.
“Go, now,” he commanded.  “We’ll drive him ourselves.  It’ll be faster than calling an ambulance.”
She ran up the path to the stairs.  Dropping to one knee, Cedric bent over Angel and told him he meant to have a look at his eye.  Angel whimpered, as Cedric placed first one hand on his brow, and the other on his cheek, to spread the eyelids.
“I can see it, son,” he said, privately shuddering at sight of the jagged piece of metal.  Fleetingly, he marveled that the boy had not hurt himself years before.  He’d often found him bent over his sculptures, either a wooden mallet or hammer in one hand and steel chisel in the other, face pressed mere inches from the stone or wood surface he was working.
A hammer lay next to Angel.  A chisel lay several feet beyond, where he must have reflexively thrown it in reaction to his pain.
“You must lie absolutely still and not touch your eye.  I’m leaving you for a moment to fetch my car, and when I’m back, I’ll carry you myself.
“Do you understand?” He demanded.  “Absolutely still, that’s the only way we can help you.  Will you do that?”
“Ye-esss,” Angel moaned through gritted teeth.
“I’ll be right back for you, son,” he said, using his most reassuring sounding voice.  How grateful he felt, that he had providentially parked his car in front of Flowers Baptist instead of leaving it at his own church and walking over.
Seconds later, he backed his Cadillac down the street.  Jerking the vehicle onto the sidewalk in front of the house, he left the engine idling.  In the brief moments since he had run from the McIlhenny’s, a handful of neighbors had gathered at the fence.  He ignored them, as he ran to Angel’s side.
“It’s Reverend Champion, son,” he spoke softly, afraid of startling him.  “Are you ready?”
“Unnhh,” he moaned.
“They’ll have everything ready for us at the hospital,” Stella called out, as she descended the stairs from her house with an old, olive-drab army blanket in hand.
“Good,” Rev. Champion said.  He bent to one knee, and in one smooth motion gently lifted Angel in his arms.
“For shock,” she said, gesturing with the blanket.
“I’ll put him in the back seat,” he told her.  “Once you’ve the blanket over him, make sure you keep his head completely still and he keeps his hands away from his eye.”
“Is he killed?” A young white boy piped up.
“No, son, just hurt, thank God,” he answered.  The growing crowd parted like the Red Sea for them to walk through, and Cedric gestured with his head for Stella to duck into the back seat through the open door.  Bending over, he gingerly installed Angel, careful to lay his head across her lap.
“Keep his head absolutely still, Sister,” he said warningly.  “I won’t be racing any, but you know how the chuckholes can be around here.”
Ioletta, seeing the commotion from her yard, managed to make it to the middle of the street just as the black Cadillac eased its way from the curb.
“Lord Jesus! Lord Jesus!” She cried.  “What can be happenin’ now?”
She halfway ran, halfway waddled, one hand to her dangerously heaving bosom, to Stella’s.  The crowd of onlookers was dispersing.
“Is someone deaded, is someone kilt?” She cried out.
“It’s Brother Angel,” a young black girl remarked, riding by on a banana-seat bicycle.  “There was blood drippin’ down his face, and he wasn’t movin’ none.”
“It’s true,” a woman neighbor said, nodding her agreement.  Seeing Ioletta’s eyes widen in fright, she quickly added, “Now don’t you worry none, sister, Reverend Champion done took ’em to the hospital.”
Still gasping from her exertions, Ioletta leaned up against Stella’s fence and buried her face in one hand.  The world seemed to be spinning around her head.
“Lord oh Lord,” she groaned in prayer.  “How much can one person suffer?”
Whether it was Angel, or Stella Jo, or herself she was praying about, it’s difficult to say.  Perhaps it was all one and the same to her.
#
In spite of the odd, hostile glances Rev. Champion and Stella were initially given, they stood together in the hospital lobby, holding hands, praying fervently, as the ER doctors worked over Angel’s wounded eye.  While you might feel self-conscious at such moments, praying in a public place, the self-consciousness tends to bleed away, once others start coming around to ask for prayer or even to rally to your support.  That’s what happened to Cedric and Stella.  By the time an hour and a half or so had gone by, what with the needs of so many other people surrounding them, their anxieties over Angel had become shared anxieties, like a burden made lighter by so many more hands.  Besides, there were people asking about the church fire and making sympathetic noises, offering their moral support.  One of the men, whose face Cedric vaguely recalled from early in his ministry, even offered how he would be back in church, once it was rebuilt.
“Mrs. McIlhenny?”
Stella looked up, startled to hear her name called.  Angel’s accident came flooding back into her mind, his shrieks of pain and Rev. Champion’s miraculous arrival upon the scene.  A doctor in green surgical scrubs looked inquiringly at her, glancing sideways at Cedric, who in a consoling gesture took one of her hands in both of his.
“Faw-tha Champion?” He said, his speech broad with the vowels of Boston.  “You’re the one whose church burned down, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” he answered, ignoring the doctor’s Catholic appellation for him.  Somehow, his church seemed a million miles away and as many years in the past.  “Mrs. McIlhenny is a neighbor.  How’s her son, Doctor?”
“He came through the surgery quite well.  He’s in recovery and you’ll be able to see him in a few hours.”
“H-his eye?” Stella asked.
The doctor took a deep breath before answering.  “You have much for which to be grateful.  If the sliver had gone deeper--well, I wouldn’t like to think about that.”
He fixed them with a stare.  “Whose idea was it, by the way, to drive him here without waiting for the ambulance?  You do know his head should have been properly immobilized, don’t you?”
A wave of shock rolled over Cedric and Stella.  Stella spoke while Cedric attempted to pull what seemed like a knife from his heart.
“Ambulances don’t always make it to our side of town,” she said.
The doctor’s gaze wavered.  His lips, pursed into a hard line, pulled down into a frown of resignation.  Turning from Cedric and Stella, he disappeared through the hospital ward doors.
Sensing Stella’s strength was about to give way, Cedric helped her to a seat.
“His eye,” she muttered.
“We can’t worry about his eye, sister,” he said, kneeling beside her and patting her on the arm.  “All we can do is thank the Lord he’s okay.”
Covering her eyes with one hand, she leaned wearily back in her chair.  “Do you ever tire of thanking God?”
“Like when somebody burns down my church or accuses me of something terrible?”
“Like--like everything,” she said, letting her hand fall, revealing tears.
A sense of inadequacy seemed to envelop him.  At the same time, he knew his presence there was more important than words.
“You know what I know?” She abruptly asked.  “Whatever happens, if I look hard enough, I can see God behind it.”
“Even when eyes are blinded?”
“Even when churches are burned down--oh, not that the Lord causes it,” she hurried to say.  “But it’s like He’s there, looking over the devil’s shoulder, winking at me, letting me know that no matter what the old rascal throws at me, God is ultimately in control.  Everything will work out fine, trials and heartaches and all.”
“Especially through trials and heartaches,” he said, adding an “Amen.”
“You know,” she said, smiling wearily, “I think I’m finally growing up.”
He nodded agreement, knowing there were very few people in the world who could really appreciate what she had said.  In spite of the fact God seemed intent on working it more deeply into his life through the occasional reminder, he was grateful he had learned that lesson for himself a long time ago.  For her, it was God winking over the devil’s shoulder.  For him, it was God’s hand guiding him past burning churches and blinded eyes and the rest of life’s disasters as if they were obstacles on the way to a final, better destination.  It wasn’t as if the Lord’s hand made him impervious to pain, or sorrow, or shock; but for many years, now, it had given him the confidence to come through.  There was a Bible passage from the Psalms that described it perfectly: Lord, you have laid your hand upon me, you hem me in, behind and before.
Cedric patted her arm and smiled, and with a jolt remembered that he had failed to secure Flowers Baptist for his Sunday services.  God’s hand meant everything, made all the difference in the world--which he hoped he would remember and appreciate when preaching from atop the steps of his church tomorrow.  In his mind’s eye he saw his flock crowding the sidewalks and spilling onto the street, faces turned upward for comfort and inspiration.  He prayed it wouldn’t rain too hard.  Few of his parishioners ever used an umbrella.



****



Chapter 23

The hospital corridors, with their yellow lights and highly waxed floors, seemed narrower and darker, on the day following Angel’s accident, than Stella remembered.  The door to his wardroom was open, the interior darker still, except for sunlight peeping through closed venetian blinds.  The sounds of a basketball game, barely audible, wafted from an invisible radio.
“Angel?” Stella called timidly.  The 3-bed ward’s privacy curtains swathed each of its patients in deeper darkness.
“Angel?” Ioletta added her voice.
“Here,” a woman answered quietly.  The privacy curtain, suspended from a ceiling track, was pulled noisily aside.  The nurse, a tall, slender blonde, motioned them in.
“Is he all right?” Stella asked, unnerved by the sight of her son’s bandaged eyes.
“His vitals are fine,” the nurse told her, as she shook down a thermometer.  “But it’s hard to say more, when he won’t talk to any of us.”
“He don’t talk,” Ioletta blurted.  “The boy’s mute.”
“Oh--” she faltered.  “No one told me, and it wasn’t in his chart.  Is he deaf, too?”
Stella didn’t answer, instead reaching for one of Angel’s hands.  On the opposite side of the bed, Ioletta shook her head at the nurse and grasped his other hand.  They were fine, strong, calloused hands but lay unresponsive to either woman’s touch.
“Angel?” Stella whispered.
There was no twitch of recognition from him.  The women exchanged glances.
“Something’s wrong,” Stella said.  “He’s not humming.  Have you heard him hum at all, Nurse?”
“Hum?” She asked, obviously perplexed.  “How do you mean?”
“The boy hums all the time,” Ioletta said.  “He has a gift for it.”
“I can’t say I’ve heard him,” she answered.  “But we can’t be with any one patient all the time.  There’re too many others.”
“Angel, honey,” Stella said.  “It’s me, your momma.  Can you hear me?”
Except for the warmth in his hands and the pulse at his throat, the women might have thought he was dead.
“I could find the doctor for you,” the nurse offered helpfully.  “He is making his rounds.”
At Stella’s nod, the nurse left.
“I wouldn’t worry none,” Ioletta commented, staring anxiously at Angel.
“I’m not,” Stella said, patting her son’s hand.  “Angel, it’s your momma.  I love you and Jesus loves you.  Can you hear me, honey?  Everything will be fine.”
Ioletta clucked her tongue and shook her head.  “Don’t you jist hate hospitals?”
“They are a necessary evil, at times.”
Startled, both Stella and Ioletta glanced toward the foot of the bed, where the doctor stood, smiling pleasantly, having entered the room in soft-soled shoes.
“Oh!” Ioletta blurted from embarrassment.
“I’m Dr. Everson, Mrs. McIlhenny.  I’m sure you remember I operated on your son’s eye.  The nurse tells me you wanted to speak?”
The doctor withdrew to the open doorway.  Stella lowered Angel’s hand to the bedcovers and gave it another pat.
“I’ll be right here,” Ioletta told her.
“His eye--” Dr. Everson began.  “The eye socket, I mean, is healing nicely.  There were no real complications from the surgery.  Other than the problems your son had prior to his accident, Mrs. McIlhenny, he really is quite healthy.”
“But he doesn’t respond, he doesn’t seem to know I’m here.”
“The nurse tells me your son is mute,” the doctor said.  “How does he normally communicate with you?  Does he know sign language?”
“He...” she began, her voice and her gaze trailing off.  How could she explain that her son was not really mute, that for some reason unknown to her and to anyone else, he simply chose not to speak?  How could she explain there were other ways in which he communicated, that speech between them was not necessary like it was for most other people?  To answer him, she simply shook her head.
“Put yourself in his place, ma’am,” he said.  “You can’t speak and you’re mostly blind, and then you lose one of your eyes in a terrible accident.”
“Yes?” She said, looking hopeful.
“The boy is fragile.  He’s gone away for a while, if only in his mind.  Eventually, he’ll come back.”
“Do you think so?”
“Allow his body to heal, and I think he’ll come back.  Even most perfectly normal people require time to adjust to losing a limb or an eye, or a breast to cancer, as far as that goes.  Sometimes people have to be allowed the grief of losing part of themselves.  It can be an enormous emotional shock.”
She nodded, understanding far better than he guessed.
“Can I take him home?” She asked.
“In a few days, perhaps.  Are you and your husband able to care for him there?”
She nodded, not wishing to explain that she had been widowed for more than a dozen years.
“If you have any other questions, please call me at my office,” he said.  He hesitated, smiling grimly, obviously wanting to say more.
“Yes?” She asked.
“You won’t always find me as discourteous as yesterday,” he said.  He briefly offered his hand for her to shake, and turned and walked away, as she stared in mute surprise.
“Is he comin’ home with us?” Ioletta asked, still holding on to Angel.
“Not now,” Stella said, recovering herself.  “In a few days.”
“Did you ax the doctor why he ain’t hummin’?”
She again took Angel’s hand into her own, and pressed it to her cheek.  “The doctor says he’s just gone away for a little while.”
Ioletta’s eyes grew in alarm.  “Gone away?  Is he comin’ back?”
“One thing I know to do is wait,” Stella said.
“Better at it than I am,” Ioletta muttered.
Stella gazed lovingly at her son.  The hospital seemed, for the moment, to have grown miraculously silent, so that her ears heard nothing other than her own heartbeat--no rattle of bedpans, no radio ballgame, no sound from the corridors.  A deep sense of peace invaded the room, forcing out all fear and anxiety.
A Bible verse ran through her mind:  Those that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not grow faint.
“Amen,” Ioletta whispered.
“Amen,” Stella agreed, knowing without it having to be said that the exact same passage of scripture ran through both their minds.



****



Chapter 24

The transformation of the half-dozen men was instantaneous, as they filed in for an emergency meeting of the deacon board the following Tuesday night.  As soon as they caught sight of Rev. Champion, whose folding metal chair was positioned next to the pastor’s desk, their smiles and easy banter died.  Cedric recognized them all from his years in the community but did not know any of them beyond an occasional chance encounter; they were from one side of Flowers Avenue and he was from the other.  He sized up each one as they took their seats:
Ernest Tyler, the youngest of the deacons at 50 years of age or so, who blurted a surprised hello upon entering and sat in the chair beside him, he knew from reputation as one of the church’s most active members; Ioletta Brown often told of how he left groceries at Sister McIlhenny’s for the Sunday dinners there.  For that reason he felt confident in expecting his support, when it came to a vote of the board to share their facilities with his church.
Frank Jamieson, a retired public school teacher, whose bald head and snowy-white fringe of hair made him appear older than his 70 years, rumored to be a distant relative to Frank and Jesse James, he knew from the integration of Calneh’s schools a few years before.  He’d been one of only a handful of teachers willing to speak up for integration, which was certainly encouraging.  He took a chair at the opposite end of the desk.
The remaining deacons typically were loath to return his greetings on the street.  Judging by that and their stony expressions now, he assumed he couldn’t expect much from them.  He wondered how quiet they would be, once their pastor revealed the meeting’s purpose.
“I believe we’re all here, Reverend J,” Ernest Tyler said, his eyes twinkling in expectation.
Willimon gestured toward two thermoses and a stack of paper cups.  “I had my wife prepare coffee.”
The two ministers had poured coffee for themselves earlier, and now all of the deacons, except for Tyler, started from their chairs.  “I’ll serve!” He said, raising a hand to prevent any rush to the desk en masse.
“I’d rather have a beer,” one man commented.
“Same old joke, every time,” Tyler said, with a nod to Cedric, whose eyebrows were raised in surprise.  “I always have to tell Avery here that we’re not Lutherans.  Wiseacre.”
“Coffee’s pretty dadgummed Lutheran,” Avery groused.  “At least at the Elks we have a choice--”  He shut up and frowned, as Tyler handed the first cup of coffee to Cedric to pass around the circle.
“Sugar or cream for anybody?” Cedric asked.  Only Jamieson shook his head, the others neglecting to answer.  They either liked their coffee black, he figured, or they were afraid his touch might contaminate the packages of sugar and powdered cream.
“Is that all?” Tyler asked, glancing around at the circle of chairs.  “Last call for alcohol--sorry.”
The men nodded or murmured, as if this was the usual routine, and he resumed his seat.  “Sorry,” he apologized again, leaning over to Cedric.  “Before I was saved I was a bartender on my way to hell.”
“If we can open with prayer,” Willimon suggested, anxious to begin, nervously running one hand through his brown, prematurely thinning hair.
Jamieson smiled faintly.  “That might be in order.”
The men bowed their heads, and Willimon prayed a brief, simple prayer asking for God’s guidance and direction, guidance and direction being two different things, evidently, and God’s grace for all their proceedings.
After the amen, he slid a steno pad and Bic ink pen across the desk to Jamieson. “Will you take the minutes, Brother Frank?”
In answer, Jamieson took a pair of half-rimmed reading glasses from his shirt pocket and pushed them onto his nose.
“Since I’m the only one who can spell quorum, I guess that leaves the honor to me,” he commented.  He touched the tip of the ink pen to his tongue and opened the steno pad.  “We are taking roll, making it official, aren’t we?”
“Yes, why don’t we do it according to Hoyle?”
“That would be fine, if we were playing cards,” he corrected the minister.  “But since this is a church and we’re making a stab at parliamentary procedure, we should rather adhere to Robert’s Rules of Order.”
“We ain’t no dadgummed parlyment, either,” Avery, seated next to Ernest Tyler, commented.  “Jist write the names down, why don’t ya?”
Everyone laughed, except for Jamieson, who poised pen above paper and looked questioningly at Tyler.
“Ernest Tyler?” He demanded.
“Present,” he answered, rolling his eyes while Jamieson busily wrote down his name.  He leaned over to Avery, and whispered, “Once a teacher, always a teacher.”
“Once a pain, always a pain, is what I say,” he shot back, failing to whisper or to divert Jamieson from his appointed task.
Avery Wills, sourpuss and wiseacre thirsty for a beer.  Wyland Cooper, or Wylie, as everyone called him, not a good nickname for a deacon, Cedric reflected privately.  Roberts Robertson, a hulking blond with deeply callused hands, well-deserved, since he was a cabinet maker by trade.  He had the awful habit of sucking his teeth, which instantly grated on Cedric’s nerves but everyone else ignored.  Lee Jackson Davis, evidently named for the South’s important Civil War figures but too diminutive to do much harm in a fight.  Cedric filed away each of their names, certain that no matter what happened in the meeting tonight, he would never be able to forget them or the faces that belonged to them.
“Make sure to ask yourself if you’re here, too,” Avery said to Jamieson.
Forehead wrinkling, Jamieson glanced over the top of his glasses at the scowling Avery but did the Christian thing by keeping his tongue, and continued to write until he had everyone’s name down, including that of Rev. Willimon and their surprise guest.  He snapped the tip of his ball point pen on the steno pad with a flourish, signaling the completion of his task.
“Uh, since that’s done,” Willimon began, “why don’t we just launch into the reason for why I’ve called an emergency meeting of the board tonight?”
Cedric sipped his coffee, surreptitiously eyed each of the men, and prayed silently.  Facing them made him all too well aware of the fact men often subverted the will of God, like Adam in the Garden of Eden.  Since none of these men seemed capable of respect for each other or for their pastor, how could he hope for them to respect what he was sure God would want them to do in regard to the needs of his flock?
“As I’m sure you are all aware, Reverend Champion’s church was set on fire by an arsonist last Wednesday night.  In meeting with him Saturday, I felt it behooved us all to have him briefly address the board.  Afterwards, I’ll open the meeting up to discussion.
He nodded in Rev. Champion’s direction.  “The floor is yours, brother.”
“Not askin’ for money, are you?” Roberts Robertson asked, noisily sucking his teeth and leaning forward in his chair, knowing that any time a preacher used the word behooved, money or morals was the subject most likely to follow.
“Ah, no,” he answered, leaning forward to match the other’s posture.
“That’s a relief,” Robertson said, visibly relaxing, as if having dodged a bullet.
Cedric scrutinized the circle of men, their eyes growing seemingly larger and rounder at the prospect of his addressing them.  Roberts Robertson might be rude, but he was grateful the man had immediately brought up the subject of money.  He had not wanted any of these men to think he had come to them begging.  Now that the money issue had been answered, he could proceed with the business at hand.
“Gentlemen.  Christian brothers,” he began, not really sure of either but willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.  “As your pastor, Reverend Willimon, has mentioned, Alliance Baptist was set on fire last Wednesday night by an arsonist.  Because of that sad fact, my congregation, which numbers well over 800 souls, has no building to meet in.  Half of my congregation, many of them elderly, walk to church on Sundays and Wednesday nights.  This last Sunday we met for worship in the rain and will be forced to do so for the foreseeable future.  Simply put, until we rebuild our facilities, there are no buildings in this area large enough or close enough to meet the needs of my congregation.”
“I heard you didn’t have no insurance money,” Avery remarked.
“Reverend Champion has the floor,” Jamieson said, staring pointedly over the top of his reading glasses.
“What can we do about it?” Tyler asked, which earned a disgusted frown from the retired school teacher.  “Is there any way we can help?”
Cedric massaged the back of his neck for a moment, and nodded gratefully to Tyler.  He had halfway expected someone to say, “Yeah?  So?”  It was infinitely better to hear someone ask what they could do to help, instead.
“I’m here to see if Flowers Avenue Baptist would be willing to share facilities with Alliance Baptist until we’ve rebuilt.”
“Now wait one minute,” Lee Jackson Davis said.
“The question is open for discussion,” Rev. Willimon announced.
“Hey now, whaddyamean?  That ain’t right,” Davis said.
“Isn’t right,” Jamieson corrected him.
“What isn’t right?” Willimon asked mildly.
“We can’t be sharing.  We’re white and they’re--they’re--nigras!” Davis protested.  “That’s what ain’t right.”
For a moment, Cedric wondered if the men might come to blows.  Ernest Tyler and Frank Jamieson immediately bristled, and Roberts Robertson and Wylie Cooper made noises that seemed in agreement with the bantam Davis.
“Oh God, I knew I shoulda went to the Elks tonight,” Avery muttered sourly.
“No, it’s absolutely the Christian thing for us to do,” Rev. Willimon said.  “Regardless of our color differences, these are our brothers and sisters in Christ, Brother Davis.”
“Well, I won’t be sitting next to any nigras,” he insisted.  “You may as well be askin’ me to mix with Jews.”
“The Lord Jesus was Jewish,” Cedric commented, smiling the least little bit to himself.
“No!  Did you hear that, hear what he just said, Reverend Johnny?  Are you lettin’ him get away with that?”
John Willimon buried his face in his hands.  “The Lord Jesus was Jewish,” he said, visibly suffering.  He wondered if he could return to accounting after being away from it for four years.
“I thought he was the son of God,” Avery remarked helpfully.
“He was--is,” Tyler said, glancing at both Davis and Avery Wills.  “But he was still Jewish.  Haven’t you ever read your Bible?”
Davis bristled like a terrier.  “Then why did they kill him?” He demanded.  “Tell me that!”
“‘He came unto his own, but his own received him not,’” Rev. Willimon recited from memory.  “‘But as many as received him, gave he the power to become the sons of God.’”
“Well, I don’t know why the old Reverend Johnny didn’t ever mention it,” he retorted.
“I could recite a lot of other passages for you, or you could come to a Bible study on the subject, Brother Davis,” he said, lowering his hands.  “But the issue before us is sharing our facilities with Alliance Baptist until they rebuild, and if you were more patient, our guest would have told us by now that they don’t wish to hold services at the same time we’re holding ours.
“Does everyone understand that?” He asked.  “Alliance Baptist would simply make use of our building while we’re not using it.”
Robertson shook his head.  “Still don’t seem right, somehow, coloreds and whites using the same facilities.”
“How do you mean?” Willimon asked, with an uncomfortable glance in Cedric’s direction.
“Wee-ell,” Robertson drawled, his eyes shifting between the two ministers.
“He means he don’t want us coloreds using the same toilets as him,” Cedric answered bluntly, tempted to add, “Assuming he uses the toilet.”
Robertson sucked at his teeth and slumped backwards in his chair.  “Yeah,” he agreed.  “Like I said, it just don’t seem right, somehow.”
“That’s right, my feelin’ exactly,” Davis concurred.
“Of all the lunkheaded things to say!” Tyler blurted.
“Brothers!  Please!”
Silence fell over the room.  Rev. Willimon dabbed his forehead with a white handkerchief and massaged his temples.
Cedric sadly shook his head.  How had he ever dreamed that a bunch of good ol’ boys would be interested in helping him and his congregation?  He had made a mistake and it was time to admit as much, time to walk while he still had a shred of dignity remaining to himself.  To his left, Ernest Tyler’s blood was obviously ready to boil.  In another moment or two the man would come to blows with the others and likely be killed in the process.  Roberts Robertson might be in his sixties, but he was twice Tyler’s size and looked like he could bend railroad spikes with his bare hands.
Cedric noisily cleared his throat, and the deacons shifted their focus to him.
“Look,” he said, dispensing with the use of gentlemen or brothers.  “I did not come here tonight to cause trouble or hard feelings in your church.  Seein’ that’s obviously what I’ve done, in making what seemed a very reasonable proposal, to me, for that I apologize.”
To the white minister’s dismay, he rose to his feet, preparing to leave.
“Please, Cedric,” he implored him. “I’m sure we can work this out, it’s just a matter of details.”
“It would never work, John,” he replied, through with mincing his words regardless of what these men thought.  He had dealt with his share of racist fools over the course of his lifetime, and it was just his bad luck that now he was confronted by a handful of religious racist fools.
“Don’t you see?  There’d be others in your church just like Lee Jackson Davis here, who wouldn’t know the difference between a rabbi and a rabbit if the two of them were sittin’ together in the same pew, and some like Roberts Robertson, who wouldn’t let Jesus himself use his toilet because he wouldn’t be white enough for his tastes--your whole church would be up in arms over us comin’ in.”
Stunned silence fell over the group.  John Willimon stared, slack jawed, along with his deacons.  Even Robertson forgot to suck his teeth.
Having spoken his mind in such blunt terms, you would have thought Cedric might put one foot in front of the other and leave.  Instead, he sat down, as if daring them to refute his claims.
“What the he--what the goldanged heck does a rabbit have to do with a rabbi, whatever that is?” Davis blurted into the silence.
“A rabbi is what the Jews call their ministers,” Jamieson said, staring again over his glasses.
“Yeah, so?”
“The people in Jesus’ day called him ‘Rabbi,’” Tyler explained, struggling to repress laughter.  “Because he was a Jew!”
“That don’t make Jesus colored,” Robertson sullenly remarked.  “God ain’t colored, and don’t try tellin’ me He is.  I don’t take to none of that black Jesus stuff.”
“Oh, but God is colored,” Cedric corrected him.
“Not in any pictures I ever saw,” Wylie Cooper said, his only comment that evening except to answer roll call.  Both Tyler and Jamieson rolled their eyes.  Tyler clamped a hand over his mouth to keep from guffawing.
Rev. Willimon cleared his throat and glanced in mild rebuke at his deacons.
“All of our pictures are from a white European perspective, Brother Cooper,” he patiently explained.  “We don’t really know what God or Jesus looks like.”
“Except that God is colored,” Cedric commented.
“Figuratively, you mean?” He asked, his eyebrows rising in alarm.
“If you can prove that malarkey, I’ll vote to let you use the church,” Robertson offered.  He sucked at his teeth and grinned with supreme confidence.  “But I’m bettin’ you’re not a wagering man, bein’ a Reverend and all.”
“He doesn’t mean--” Willimon began.
“I do mean,” Cedric said, interrupting him.
“Oh, this is good,” Avery remarked, dangerously close to cracking a smile.  “I’m in.”
“You in?” Robertson asked Davis and Cooper.
“I’m in,” Davis said, almost fiercely.  “I know the Bible don’t say nothin’ about God being colored.”
“Wylie?” Robertson demanded.
Wylie Cooper grimaced like somebody who feels he is suddenly about to go in over his head.  But he nodded his assent.
“Gentlemen--” Rev. Willimon began.  Did he really have to remind them that they were in a church, were deacons of the church, and that they were there to discuss and vote on the issue of sharing their facilities with Alliance Baptist Church, that they decidedly were not there to make wagers?
“You in?” Ernest Tyler and Frank Jamieson asked him in unison.
Reluctantly, he nodded.  He was in.  Problem was, he knew the Bible didn’t say anything about God being colored.  Of course, it didn’t say God was white, either, not that he could recall offhand.  But the point was, Cedric and his flock would not have the use of Flowers Baptist and would have to go elsewhere, when he wanted desperately to help them.
“Did y’all bring your Bibles?” Cedric asked, picking up his own, an old, well-worn King James Bible he’d set on the desk before the meeting began.
Not expecting a Bible study, none of the men had brought their Bibles.  They scrambled, most of them, to take Bibles from an office bookshelf, and came back to their seats with smug grins.
“You say God isn’t colored?” Cedric asked, eyebrows raised enquiringly to meet each man’s gaze.  Except for Ernest Tyler and Frank Jamieson, most of them answered with a smirk.
“That’s right, I agree with Roberts,” Davis said, nearly swaggering.  “I’ve read the Book, and my mother used to read it to me every night before sending me off to bed.  It don’t say nothin’ about God being colored.”
“Thank God!” Robertson muttered none too quietly.  “Thank God Almighty!”
“Then tell me what it means in Revelation 4:3,” Cedric ordered them, as he flipped open to the last book of the Bible, “when it says God looked like a jasper, a sardine stone, and like an emerald.”
Robertson, Davis, and Cooper turned the pages of their Bibles.  Alarm was in their postures, if not written on their faces.  They stared at the passage in question, seemingly dumbstruck.
“Sounds pretty colorful to me!” Tyler said happily.  “He’s got you there, Roberts.”
“Says he looks like stones,” Robertson drawled out.  “It don’t say he’s colored.”
“Very colorful stones,” Jamieson remarked.  “He’s definitely in the right, Roberts.
“Looks like you won, Reverend Champion.”
“I don’t know,” Rev. Willimon mused aloud.  “It’s a colorful picture of God, but I wouldn’t say that means colored.”
“That’s right, he’s right!” Davis crowed in triumph.
Cedric couldn’t believe his ears.  He had obviously proved God was not white like they all thought, and here, once again, he felt the church slipping through his fingers.
Jamieson tilted his bald head in his pastor’s direction.  “Exactly what do you think the word colorful means?”
Willimon compressed his lips in thought for a moment.  “Ah, I see--full of color.”  Index finger on the offending passage, he read it again, mumbling quietly to himself, before he said, “And there’s red and green, and yellow and brown in there, I think, if I remember these rightly, Roberts.”
“The man knows whereof he speaks.”
Everyone looked in astonishment at Avery, who they knew had been a rock hound since his early boyhood.  Anybody visiting his house was shown buckets of polished stones and dozens of display cases, and could tell you he was plumb crazy about them.  The man grinned from ear to ear.
Robertson shook his head and sucked his teeth.  Davis and Cooper waited anxiously for his verdict.  In a less tolerant era, say any time up to the summer of ’68, he might have gone home for an axe handle or maybe even a sheet and cross.  But times were different, this being 1970, and he had made a wager.
“Fair is fair,” he admitted.  He stared at the floor, refusing to look in Cedric’s direction.  “I think I’ll push on home, now.”
“Yeah, me too,” Davis said.  “Yeah,” Cooper agreed.
Avery Wills watched the three defeated men saunter from the room.  “Not bad at all, not bad at all,” he said.  “Turned out a whole lot more interestin’ than I thought.
“We shoulda put money on it though, Rev.,” he whispered, as he shook hands with Cedric and shot a grin in Willimon’s direction.
Both Ernest Tyler and Frank Jamieson enthusiastically pumped Cedric’s hand in congratulations.
“Anything you and your people need, we’ll be glad to help,” Tyler said to him.  “Ain’t that so, Frank?”
“Isn’t, Ernest, not ain’t,” Frank corrected him.  “And of course we’ll be glad to do anything we can.”
Afterwards, when the two ministers sat alone, drinking the last of the coffee, a grin spread slowly over Rev. Willimon’s face.
“So those jokers are your deacons, John,” Cedric observed, anticipating the other man’s comments.
Willimon lowered his paper coffee cup but not soon enough.  Laughter exploded from him, blowing coffee over his desk and both men’s Bibles like it was shot from a cannon.  They laughed together, one howling with glee and the other booming out his guffaws as they scrambled to wipe off the leather covers of their Bibles.
“S-s-sorry.  Sorry you h-had to go through that,” Willimon said, barely able to speak.
“D-d-don’t, no m-more!” Cedric begged him, holding his aching sides.  He couldn’t remember ever laughing so hard in all his life.
Both men wiped tears from their eyes.
“M-must have been the tension,” Cedric remarked, finally regaining control of himself.
“I should have warned you what to expect,” Willimon said.
“No, no,” he answered.  “I expected as much.  Believe me, I’ve dealt with worse foolishness, but somehow, you always figure it will be different among people who claim to be Christians.”
Momentarily the picture of sobriety, they sat a while longer, neither one saying anything.  Finally, Cedric looked questioningly at Willimon.
“What was that about not catching my allusion to God’s color?”
“Oh, that?” Willimon responded.  “If I’d dead on said to Roberts that he was wrong, we’d still be arguing.  Of course, you would be long gone, but we’d be here, me and my six deacons.”
“And you put up with ’em.”
“Oh, you know, some of them may be fools,” he said, “but they’re my fools, as the saying goes.  The church hasn’t elected new deacons for years, not since long before I arrived here.
“I suppose,” he said, hands spread in an expansive gesture, “they were good for something at one time.”
Cedric shook his head, not willing to bet on that statement.  “After tonight,” he said, “they might think seriously about whether they want to continue or not.”
“Doesn’t matter, really.  There’d be several of them wanting to quit soon anyhow, I expect.”
“How’s that?” Cedric asked.  Willimon’s grin communicated he had a surprise in store for someone.
“I don’t know about your church, but in ours, as I recently discovered in reading the bylaws, the deacons are required to tithe,” he said.  “A couple of them haven’t tithed in years.  I checked.”
“The ones you don’t want, I hope.”
Willimon nodded happily, at which Cedric rose to leave.
“Can I call you tomorrow about how we may best share facilities, John?”
“Tomorrow’s good.  What are you thinking about Wednesday evenings, by the way?”
“Tuesdays or Thursdays will do fine for us,” he answered.  “It’ll be a departure from the traditional, but I’m sure my people won’t mind.”
“I know you were worried about tonight,” Willimon said, rising to shake hands with him.  “But I just had a feeling God would work everything out.”
“He did that.  For a while there, I wasn’t sure, but He sure did at that.”
Still gripping his hand, Rev. Willimon said, “I want to thank you again, Cedric, for Saturday night.  Sister McIlhenny was awfully grateful to you, and I know my wife was grateful, too, you showing up out of the blue like that.”
Pleasure spread across Cedric’s face.  “It’s funny,” he said, withdrawing his hand from the other’s grasp.  “We don’t always know why God allows certain things, but then he has us in the right place at just the right time to help out.”
“Amen, brother,” he agreed.  “Why don’t we walk out together?”
As he locked the church’s front doors, he asked Cedric to wait.  Bibles in hand, they descended the steps together.
Cedric’s Cadillac was parked at the curb.  “Need a ride home?” He asked, knowing full well that he would say no to a ride just around the corner.
“No,” Willimon said.  “I just wanted you to know what you said about being in the right place at just the right time is exactly how I feel.”
“Huh,” he grunted, confident he knew precisely what Willimon meant.  A warm glow spread across his features.  “I appreciate that, John.”
“As awful, as ironic, as it sounds, Cedric, I’m glad I could be here, I’m glad Flowers Baptist could be here, when you had your fire.  I can’t say I know why it happened, but for sure I believe that what the devil meant for evil, God will turn into good.”
Cedric took a deep breath and glanced at the stars above their heads.  The universe might be vast beyond imagining, but in this moment God felt very close.  “I guess you never read the one sermon I’m famous for, John.”
“No, what’s that?” He asked sheepishly.
“It’s about the Israelites and the ’gyptians, how the devil meant to do evil to the Israelites, but God meant it for good.”
A thrill went down Rev. Willimon’s spine.  It remained after Cedric drove away in his Cadillac, and it continued as Willimon walked up the flagstone path to his house and opened the front door.  God is good, God is good, he thought, in the good times and in trials, God is good.
He called out his wife Carol’s name and heard her sweet voice answer from the baby’s room.  God was good and it was good to be where God wanted him, and it was fine with him if God wanted him to remain in Calneh for the rest of his life.



****



Chapter 25

Why do people sing?  Why is it that on some Sundays you sit in church and feel like dozing off, while on other Sundays you burst into praise and worship as if it’s bubbling up out of your soul like champagne from a bottle?  That champagne feeling was what a lot of people had as they started out for church the next Sunday.  For blocks around Flowers Avenue, on the south side of the street, as people began their usual Sunday morning stroll, the bubbly just began to flow, and they didn’t feel one bit self-conscious about it either.  You should have seen it, you should have seen the faces of the “big church” as those who walk the narrow path went on by, many of them twirling and dancing, and singing their hearts out.
Were these people crazy?  What did they have to be so dadgummed happy about, when their precious Alliance Baptist was a pile of ashes?
I don’t care is about all the answer the Alliance Baptist folks could have given them that day.  All they knew was the bubbling forth, that the spirit of joy had fallen upon them as soon as they stepped from the doorways of their homes.
One thing for sure, after the depressing gloom of the previous Sunday, it made chills run up and down Rev. Champion’s spine, waiting for his flock to come to him.  He heard them long before he saw them.  And then people were streaming onto Flowers Avenue from its side streets and filling the sidewalk in front of the charcoal remains of their church like it was a palace of gold.
Cedric had never in his life been one of those preachers who find it a struggle to preach.  You may as well look for a fish who feels it’s hard work to swim.  No matter how well, if not exactly smoothly, things had worked out at his meeting with Rev. Willimon and his deacon board, he had still harbored at least a few reservations, a few doubts, about using Flowers Baptist’s facilities.  The singing, the obvious joy in his people’s faces, was like a miracle, certainly a sign, from God, allaying his fears.  He felt incredibly energized, like those ads claim for this or that tonic or other vitamin preparation.  He leaped up the concrete steps of his church to the landing and led the singing himself for the next 45 minutes.  They were havin’ church, they were praising and adoring God at the foot of those stairs like they were the stairs that lead to the throne of God.  All the while, the reservoir of his soul was filling up with the word of the Lord.
“Forgiveness is a mighty peculiar thing!” He cried out.
“Mighty peculiar!” The crowd answered.  “Amen!”
With rubble for his backdrop, he cast his gaze over the crowd, most of them standing on the street, while a smattering of the elderly sat on nylon-webbed aluminum patio chairs, all of them eagerly craning their necks at him.
“Do I need to say that again?” He shouted, his basso profundo, unamplified voice carrying easily to every ear.
“Amen!” The crowd roared.
“Forgiveness is a peculiar thing, a mighty peculiar thing!  When you’ve been hurt, when your best friend has betrayed you, when devastation has come and set up house at your place, what’s the first thing you want to do? Don’t tell me your first thought isn’t to strike back, to retaliate in like measure, and then some, in return!  That’s why we know forgiveness is born in the heart of God--it’s different, it’s foreign, it just ain’t the way you and I are used to doin’ things.
“God sent Jesus as the gift of forgiveness to the whole world while we were still his enemies, unrepentant sinners going our own road.”
That’s how he began his sermon, on the second Sunday after the burning of Alliance Baptist Church.  Their hearts had been wounded, their faith shocked, by the attack of an enemy working under the inspiration of the enemy of God, but God Himself had come to their rescue and carried them on the wings of the eagle.  It didn’t matter whether it was in ancient Rome or here in Calneh on March 1st in 1970.  Persecution of the believer was persecution, fiery trial was fiery trial, and from all of them, the believer’s faith comes forth as pure gold.
Could they forgive, though?  Could they forgive even as Jesus asked His Father to forgive those who crucified Him on Mt. Calvary?  Could they forgive as the Father Himself commanded, that they might be like their Father in Heaven?
Could they really forgive their enemy and pray for the enemy’s salvation?  That was the question he presented to them, pouring out heart and soul to his people that morning, and that was the question he spoke into his wife’s heart, and her brother’s as well, as they stood near the foot of the stairs, gazing upward, over his head, it seemed, looking into heaven for an answer to their own sense of guilt.
He didn’t tell them who it seemed had burned the church down or provide them with so much as the smallest of clues.  He had wrestled with his own shock and sense of betrayal, taking it all to the throne of grace, as he would have put it, and asked for an outpouring of grace to forgive and to see what transformation God wanted to do in his own life through this tragedy.  Now he wanted his people to wrestle with the hatred and anger and shock in the same way, for them to move on as a church and see what God would do.
Hadn’t God delivered the children of Israel from Egypt?  Hadn’t God brought good out of what the devil had meant for evil?  Wouldn’t God, who changed not, do the same for them?  Wouldn’t He also lift them up like the slaves returned from Egypt?  Wouldn’t He promote them over their enemies and give back double for what the devil had stolen?  Wouldn’t Jesus call them to the head of the table even though some people didn’t like them at the table at all?  Wasn’t it better for God to lift them up, if their brother wouldn’t do it?
Looking out upon the crowd, he saw that there was still bewilderment there, probably not unlike that which John the Baptist’s followers had known upon discovering he had been beheaded to suit the whim of a dancing girl.  Or maybe like those followers brave enough to look on as the Savior was crucified?
“Your church hasn’t been destroyed,” he said, repeating what he had delivered to them last week.  But last week, under a chill rain, the words had rung hollow even to his ears.  He spread out his hands to them, shouting, “Everyone of you lives!  Glorify God under the temple of his skies!”
If they had harbored doubts, had thought that maybe a fire would defeat and devastate their pastor, they were delivered from such notions.  They had heard him preach under the unction, as they called it, within the four walls of Alliance, and now they were hearing him preach under the open sky with that same unction, and knew he was a man who would never give up.
They shouted with the same enthusiasm they began with that morning, and sang even louder in response, though the piano and organ were gone, burned to ash or melted into plastic puddles.  Reverend Champion knew his people would come through, all right.
“I’ve finished with one sermon today,” he said, rejoicing over his people.  “But there’s another still to preach.  Do you all know where I’m off to, and you’re invited to come along?”
A hush fell upon the crowd.  Among them, the church’s dozen elders and equal number of deaconesses beamed in anticipation of the forthcoming announcement.
“Now, you won’t pass out will you, when I tell you?  You won’t desert me in my hour of need?”
“Where we goin’, Reverend?” A handful of people shouted in unison, ignorant of the coming bombshell.
“Did you pray for the Lord to provide?” He answered back.  “Did you tell Him we needed us a building until we could rebuild our own?”
“Thass right!” A woman shouted, her voice suspiciously similar to Ioletta Brown’s, except that Ioletta, standing on the sidewalk at the far edge of the crowd, was sunk in thought, tears running down her cheeks, the sermon on forgiveness still ringing in her ears.
“Where to?” More people cried.
“Can I lead you there?” He asked.  “Can I ask you to follow me?  Can I expect you to treat the house of the Lord like our own house of the Lord?”
“Yehss!”
Without a further word, he descended from the landing and took his wife by the arm.  The crowd separated for them, as he took the lead and crossed Flowers Avenue to the north side of the street.  Smiling down at his wife, he made the turn toward Flowers Avenue Baptist Church.  As he knew they would, people gaped, but not for long.  Quickly, they followed the Champions and their elders and deaconesses, who followed right behind, and joined in the spirit of the moment by singing the old hymn, Marching To Zion.
Calneh had never seen a day like that Sunday and perhaps never would again.  What would happen when they reached the doors of Flowers Avenue Baptist?  Many had fleeting visions of white-sheeted ghouls barring the way, axe handles and baseball bats in hand.  Others wondered if the Calneh police would be there to keep them out.  Some cringed at the thought of a crowd of their white neighbors meeting them with taunts and curses.
But when the doors flew open with Rev. Johnny, as many of them knew him, to welcome them, and people like Stella Jo McIlhenny and Ernest Tyler and Frank Jamieson, along with their families, their fears were quickly assuaged.  If God was for them, who could be against them?
Except for those folks just mentioned, the church was empty.  Rev. Johnny had completed the task of reading out his sermon from the pulpit and most of his congregation had departed for home.  The Alliance Baptist crowd marched in and took their seats in the pews.  Rev. Champion was welcomed into the pulpit by the white minister, whose face beamed like the face of Moses after he had spoken with God on the mountain.  Miss Frenchie Leone, organist from Alliance Baptist, took her place, and Red Sampson, the pianist, took his at the piano.
The people gazed in wonderment at the sanctuary, different yet so similar to their own, and felt like they had entered the promised Canaan land.
#
“Where on earth is Ioletta?” Stella mumbled to herself, as the last stragglers disappeared inside the doors.  She had expected her to be among the first to arrive, and here she wasn’t anywhere in evidence at all.  It worried her because she just didn’t think Ioletta would want to miss the occasion for anything in the world.  Of course, hardly anyone had known ahead of time about Flowers Avenue Baptist and Alliance Baptist joining together to share facilities, leastwise until Pastor Willimon announced the news to his church at the tail end of the service that morning and Rev. Champion had made the announcement to his church in his own way.
She could be ill, she considered.
“You coming in, Sister Stella?” Luella Jamieson, Frank Jamieson’s wife, asked her.
“I would,” she said, wistfully staring inside the church, “but I think I better check on Sister Brown.  I notice she didn’t make it, and I’m wondering if she isn’t awfully ill or something.”
“Sister Brown?”
“My friend Ioletta,” she answered.  “You didn’t see her, did you?”
“No, and I don’t think one could easily miss your Ioletta Brown, Stella Jo.”
“No, I guess not,” she mumbled.  She fanned herself with her white hankie, and said, “That’s a lovely hat you’re wearing today, Luella.”
“Why thank you,” Luella said.  “So few people wear hats like they used to, it’s nice to wear one now and then.  It seems much more respectful in church, doesn’t it?”
“I guess so,” she said, smiling wanly.  She frequently wore hats, yet Luella had never complimented her on any of them.  She wondered why not?  But then, few people ever complimented her on any of her clothing.  It was enough to depress a woman.
“Are you coming in, dear?” Luella asked.  “Or should you check on your friend?”
“I think I best, and I have Angel to fetch at the hospital today, you know.”
Luella, or Lu, as most people from church called her, disappeared inside the doors, which clanged shut behind her.  Wringing her hands, Stella descended the church steps and waited on the sidewalk for traffic to pass before crossing the street.  She put her hands down at her sides, refusing to wring them further, before she had walked a full block.
“I refuse to worry anymore,” she insisted.  “Lord, I’ve decided I’m giving my anxieties and fears to you from now on.  Do you hear me, Lord?”
She didn’t hear an answer and she hadn’t expected any booming voice from the sky, but she did feel immediately better.  What was the use in fear or anxiety? What had they ever profited her?
“You promised to be with us and to never forsake or abandon us, Lord, and I’m taking you up on it.”
Alliance’s remains loomed a block beyond Ioletta’s house.  That was how she thought of it, the remains.  The fire had consumed the majority of the building.  Only a few timbers with their rafters still stood, giving one the impression of a pitifully charred skeleton.
Arson, she thought to herself.  Sight of the church sickened her.  How could anyone be so monstrous as to burn down a house of worship?  Or any house at all, as far as that went?  What sick, evil hearts and minds some people had.  It made her feel terribly sad.  But the moment passed, as she thought of all those people worshiping in Flowers Baptist at that very moment.  She only wished for the day anyone could feel accepted in whatever church they happened to enter, regardless of the color of their skin.
She found Ioletta on her front porch stoop, legs outstretched, head bowed in grim contemplation.
“Hey, you all right?” She called, walking the hard-packed clay to the old but neatly kept shotgun-style house.
Ioletta glanced up from her thoughts and bowed her head again.  “Cain’t nobody get by herself once in a while around here?”
“Ioletta Brown!” She exclaimed.  “What on earth can be wrong with you?”
Ioletta let out a long, whistling sigh through the gap in her front teeth.  “I’m tired, I guess, just plain tired.”
“Tired of what?  You don’t work any harder than I do, and I’m not tired, not really.”
“Oh, there’s plenty kinds of tired.  They ain’t all from workin’, you know.”
“Then what’s it from?  How can a person be tired if it’s not from working?”
“Wrasslin’, wrasslin’ with the Lord, I guess.”
O, Stella silently formed the word with her lips.  “I see.”  She sank to the porch beside Ioletta.  “Why are you wrestling Him now?  Have you about beat Him, or has He about beat you?  Who’s winnin’ here?”
“Sometimes you are so funny, Stella Jo,” she said, eyes rolled in mock disgust.  “Now, how am I gonta beat God?”
“You’re the one wrestling Him, not me.”
Ioletta shook her head.  “I wish it was you.  Lord knows, I’m sick of it.”
“Then why don’t you give up and let Him beat you?”
“Don’t want to, I guess.  That’s the problem, isn’t it?  I been carryin’ this thing so long, it’s hard to give it up.”
“It’s hard to forgive, is it?” Stella quietly asked.
“Fo’ some of us,” she admitted.  She nodded her head unashamedly.  “But then, you were always so sheltered.”
“How was I ever more sheltered than you?” Stella asked, obviously perplexed.  “I’ve never understood that.”
“You just be tryin’ to worm it out of me, girl, I know,” she said, her head tilted toward Stella.  “It ain’t gonta happen.”
Stella frowned, and looked away.  “I suppose I should see to Angel at the hospital.”  Quietly, she added, “Of course, I hate to think what shape I’ll find you in, the next time I see you.”
“What are you talkin’ about?”
“Well, Jacob and all, you know,” she said, barely restraining a grin.
“Oh, you’re funny.  Who Jacob?” Ioletta demanded.
“The Jacob,” she answered, with a reassuring pat on the arm.  “You know, the one who wrestled God in the Bible.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Well, God crippled him, didn’t he?”
From the sharp intake of breath, Stella knew she had hit her mark.  A lone tear trickled down Ioletta’s cheek.
“I ain’t cryin’,” she said, teeth gritted.  She wiped the tear off with the back of one hand.  “I ain’t.”
“Nobody said you had to,” Stella whispered.
“And I ain’t,” Ioletta repeated, as she reached out for Stella and sobbed on her shoulder.
Stella patted her on the back.  “That’s all right, honey, you don’t have to cry unless you want to.”
“I know,” Ioletta said, pushing her away and knuckling the moisture from her eyes.  “What was your father like, Stella Jo?”
“The kindest, sweetest, most gentle man I ever knew.”  Her eyes lit up with memory of him.  “I suppose that’s where my Angel comes by his sweetness, you know.”
“It weren’t from your Leonard, that’s for sure.”
“Oh, Leonard had his ways.”
“When he wasn’t drinkin’,” Ioletta muttered.
“Ioletta!  My Leonard wasn’t a drunkard.”
“Well, I seen him myself,” she protested.  “Layin’ out on that porch of yours, an’ him shakin’ from the DT’s.”
“Those weren’t the DT’s!”
“Well, then what were they, girl?”
“My Leonard had diabetes,” she said.  “And after Duane was taken from us, he didn’t always do well at taking care of himself.  His insulin level would fall, you know, and he’d pass out.”
“And it had nothin’ to do with drinkin’?”
“No,” she said, disgusted.  “Oh, he had a drink once in a while, especially after Duane vanished and all, but he wasn’t a drunkard or anything like that.”
“Well...”
“Funny, how some people judge their neighbors, when they just don’t know,” Stella said, obviously offended.
“Huh,” Ioletta grunted.  “At least Leonard had his excuses, I guess.”
The two of them were silent for a moment, staring off in different directions, neither one willing to look at the other.
“I guess,” Stella spoke quietly, breaking the silence, “this is about your father.”
Ioletta didn’t answer, showed no sign of having heard her friend.
“Now that I think of it, Ioletta, all these years we’ve known each other, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard you speak of the man.  Do you hate him so much?”
In response, she took a deep breath, held it, and exhaled slowly.  Took another, repeating the exercise.
“Doesn’t help your high blood any, thinking about him, huh?”
“Pushed him out of my mind for a long time,” Ioletta said between breaths.  “This forgiveness business done brung it all back to me.”
Tremors shook her frame.  Stella watched with wide eyes, unsure if she was crying or only restraining laughter.
“What?” She demanded.
“Sorta reminds me of what one of your closets used to look like,” Ioletta said.  She burst out in momentary laughter.  “You open the door and all this mess falls on your head like in the cartoons!”
“Oh sure, make this about me instead of about you,” Stella retorted.  “I guess it isn’t all that bad, if you can laugh about it.”
“I always laugh the biggest when I’m in pain,” she said, with a sniffle.
“You could just clean out that closet,” Stella suggested.
“Maybe...’Course, maybe I’ll just close the door instead, lock it forever an’ a day.”
“Ioletta--” Stella began, but clamped her mouth shut, as she saw her friend’s defenses go up higher.
“Yeah?”
“Oh, nothing,” she answered, praying under her breath.  “I know you’ll feel much better when you just open that door inside of you and clean out all the junk, but I guess you’ll have to do it in your own time.  Lord knows, you can be stubborn.”
“Well...”  Ioletta sniffled back more tears.  Rising to her feet, she straightened up and brushed herself off.  “I should be workin’ on my tattin’, is what I should be doin’.  Ain’t done any lace work in a long time.  But I suppose you want I should go down to that hospital with you to see to Angel?”
“That would be all right,” Stella answered, smiling quickly.  “I guess the Lord won’t strike me with lightning just for hanging out with someone who won’t forgive her own dearly departed father.”
“Oh, shut up,” Ioletta retorted.  “Let me go in and blow my nose, and I’ll be right with you.”



****



Chapter 26

As Ioletta walked, she unconsciously whistled the chorus to Beulah Land through the gap in her front teeth.  On either hip was perched a straw basket, cornucopias overflowing with men’s dress shirts.  Birds answered from the trees with whistles and trills, cackles and caws.  The joy of spring could not be quenched by the prospect of hours of ironing or by a few passing vehicles, one among them spewing a trail of diesel fumes behind it.
On some days, seeing her thusly burdened, neighbors driving by would slow to offer a lift, and unless there was the threat of a cloudburst, she would laugh and point her chin at Stella Jo’s house.  Getting in and out of a car and hauling out the baskets from the back seat or trunk was more work than just going on, when it was but a two or three minute stroll to her destination.  Besides, there was the morning air and the birds and flowering trees, and the chance to stretch her legs instead of being stuck at home, bent over her ironing board or her sewing, thinking all by her lonesome about things she didn’t want to think about, and how Lamarr had not made it home this past March for his vacation from the Army.
Graciously gauntleted by Angel’s statues, she came up Stella Jo’s path.  The stairs were a trial, always had been, thank you Lord for the handrail (on one side only), which made it easier for anyone wanting to help Angel out of the house.  Not that Angel really needed help.  If he wasn’t in leg braces and on elbow crutches, as on his Sunday forays to church, he was just as likely to crawl where he wished, the yard and his statues his furthest destination.
Stella opened the door and came down the steps to take one of the baskets.  Ioletta wrinkled her brow at Stella’s harried expression, at her turning and rushing up the steps to the door.
“You goin’ to say hello, what a fine day it is, or just ignore me like I wasn’t here?”
“Oh, hey,” she answered, with a laugh.  “Don’t mind me.”  She waited for Ioletta to reach the porch.  “I’m late, is all, problems with Angel in the bathroom this morning, you know.”
“Well I didn’t know but I appreciate how the boy is a trial at times.”
Stella held the screen door, as Ioletta sidled past with her basket.
“It’s not fair to ask you to do this all the time,” Stella said, closing the door and setting her basket on the floor.  Ioletta dropped hers from her hip.
“Fair?  What you talkin’ about?  I been watchin’ over your Angel now for a lotta years, one way or another.  Don’t you remember that’s how we met?”
Stella sighed.  “Yes, but this has been going on for--for over two months.  I hate imposing on you so long.”
“It ain’t imposin’--gives me something to do besides look at the four walls of my house while I iron and sew for a bunch o’ people I don’t know worth beans.”
“Well,” she said, timidly staring at the floor.  “If you’re sure.”
“An’ if you don’t let me look after him?  You plan on puttin’ him in some kind of home?”
“No,” Stella said, glancing at Angel asleep on his sofa.  “But at least you could let me pay you something.  It’s not right you should have to do it all while I’m at work.”
“Oh.”  She had gone through this very same argument with Stella since the first day Angel came home from the hospital.  “Ifn it makes you feel so bad, I s’pose we can talk about it later.  But don’t you think you should be off to work?”
Stella checked her Timex wristwatch.  “Oh gosh, yes! If I don’t go this very second, I really will be late.”
That was the end of their argument.  Stella grabbed her purse and rushed out the door.  Glad to have her gone, Ioletta pulled Stella’s ironing board from a closet and plugged in the iron to begin her work.  In the space of little more than an hour, she starched and ironed a dozen shirts and left them to hang from the molding of two different doorways.  When Angel stirred awake, she turned off the iron and went to make breakfast.  While she spooned scrambled eggs into Angel’s mouth, she reflected that she and Stella were about even, since she breakfasted and lunched from Stella’s refrigerator at the same time as Angel.  When it came right down to it, to be genuinely fair, she felt she should maybe pay Stella for the extra electricity used ironing.
When she resumed her work, she kept up a running commentary for Angel’s benefit, informing him of events around Flowers Avenue, both in the black church and in the white church and among their various neighbors.  Naturally, Angel said nothing, a poor return on her investment of time and gab.  In between soliloquies she sang, either entire hymns or snatches of choruses from church, and if on the rare occasion she couldn’t remember the words, she whistled the tune between her teeth.  In her own way she was havin’ church, and just because Angel failed to join in didn’t mean he wasn’t part of it or didn’t benefit from it.  For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them, meant to her that Jesus was in the house with them, whether Angel could speak for himself or not.
After ninety minutes went by and her dogs were barkin’, she sat down on Angel’s sofa.  She propped her feet on the coffee table, and lifted Angel’s feet onto her lap.
“You doin’ okay, baby?  Today could be your day.  You know we love you and we’re all prayin’ for ya, don’t ya?”  She sighed deeply.  “One of these days you’ll come back, just like that fancy doctor said.  Your momma wants you back, an’ everbody else does, too.”
Angel appeared unmoved by her speech, failing to turn even his head to indicate he had heard her voice.  For what must be the tenth time that morning, he raised his hands and flexed them near his face.  She shook her head in frustration.  Whatever Angel was doing, she couldn’t figure it out.  It wasn’t like he knew sign language.
Heaving a big sigh, she moved his feet from her lap and rose from the depths of the sofa cushions, and nearly fell, just managing to steady herself against the coffee table.  As she straightened up, Angel’s collection of hammers and chisels caught her attention.
“Maybe you been tryin’ to tell me somethin’, Angel!” She exclaimed, nearly popeyed.  She stared first at his flexing hands, and then at the hammers and chisels spread across the table, and back again at his hands.  What did she have to lose?  Certainly he wouldn’t hurt himself, would he?
While a hammer would be okay, the chisels were out, she decided.  What did he need with a chisel anyway?  Searching the room, she quickly found an eraserless pencil, its lead worn down to a nub.  Not much to worry about that nub poking his remaining eye, she guessed.
In silent prayer, she bent over and took Angel’s right hand and forced the hammer into his grasp.
“Now don’t go hittin’ me with that, honey,” she said, only mildly concerned.  As soon as the handle was in his grip, she would have sworn his brow rose in expectation.
Bent over him again, she helped him make a fist around the pencil, like he might hold a real chisel.  For a moment he smiled, the first smile she had seen since his stay in the hospital.  Then the pencil broke.  Abruptly, he tossed the pencil remains aside and turned his head toward the sofa back.
“Well, I declare!” Ioletta said in surprise.  “I believe you’re sulking, young man.”
He rolled fully onto his side and buried his face in the cloth upholstery.
“Do you want a real chisel?” She demanded.  “Is that what you want?”
She wasn’t sure but she thought she saw him nod.  It had been the slightest of movements.
“Well, I’ll fetch it for you, boy, but if you hurt yourself--”
He rolled onto his back at once and held out his hand for the promised item.
“Well, I--” she began, then picked up a chisel and handed it over.  “I might have to kill you boy, you go and hurt yourself and put me in trouble with your mother an’ all, you know.”
A sudden grin covered his face.  For the time being it was his only response.  She stood over him, staring down as he continued to lie on his back, fists frozen around his tools.
“What now, boy?” She asked, anxious to see what he would do, when it seemed as though he was caught in a freeze-frame like you see in the movies.  “You mean to do something or just hold them like that from now until eternity?”
Eternity it might be, since he either couldn’t or wouldn’t answer her.  Finally, with another prayer for Angel on her lips, she decided it was time she returned to her work.  Watching from her ironing board, she clucked her tongue in frustration.  What was wrong with the boy?  Why didn’t he do something?  Had she misunderstood, should she take the hammer and chisel from him?
She tilted her head and cocked an ear.  What was the strange sound she heard?  At first she mistook it for honeybees, which were a plentiful fixture around Stella’s yard.  But there weren’t any bees in the house, not unless she had lost her eyesight, which she knew was not the case.  Gradually, she realized the sound emanated from the direction of the sofa.  Was there a musical quality to it?
She sat her steam iron on its heel and came around the ironing board to stand next to Angel.  Bent over with her ear close to his lips, she was finally able to reassure herself that the sound came from him.  Angel was humming!  A minute later, she reached Stella by phone at the offices of the Calneh Bus Lines Company, Inc.  When she hung up, she joined in, whistling instead as Angel hummed the tune to one of her favorite old hymns.  It was Beulah Land.



****



Chapter 27

Rev. Champion smiled at his guests across the dinner table, past the centerpiece of yellow roses floating in water, careful to avoid a lingering glance at Erwin’s wife.  Sharese was a surprise, if bit of a shock.  For one, she was much prettier than he would have expected of Erwin and, for another, her coloring was fair enough for the casual observer to mistake her for a white woman--an incongruous choice for a man whose dislike, if not outright contempt, for whites, was well known in Calneh.
Both ministers were dressed in their usual black suits, white shirts and black ties, while Sharese and Theodora wore full-length cotton dresses in pastels befitting mid-May.
Erwin dabbed carefully at his newly acquired pencil-thin mustache with a cloth napkin.  His thin build and fine features, along with his jerry curls, made him a dapper looking figure.
“What a fine meal,” he spoke agreeably in Theodora’s direction.  “We would be indebted if you shared your recipe with us.”
“I’m so glad you liked it.”  With a wink for her husband, she added, “You should come more often.  Cedric’s always harping on his fruits and vegetables.”
“They’re very important for maintaining proper digestion, Theodora,” Cedric said in his own defense.  “Especially at my age.”
“Let’s not get into that again, not at the dinner table, Cedric.”
“I’ve always adored beef stroganoff,” Sharese gushed.
Theodora stood and gathered up an armful of dishes.  “Why don’t we leave the men to their talk, dear?”
After the women had gone, the two men remained seated.  Erwin sipped from his coffee cup.
“Wonderful meal,” he said.  He set the cup, white English bone china, in its saucer, and sighed exaggeratedly.  His gaze swept the room.  Theodora had decorated it simply, yet the sideboard, the dinner table and chairs, and other furnishings, were quality pieces.
“You have a nice little cottage here, Cedric.”
Cedric ignored the slight.  “We like it fine--just about right for the two of us, since the boys left and can’t visit much.”
For a moment, the two men locked eyes.  Rev. Champion smiled, as Erwin lifted his coffee cup and took another sip.  Did the man’s hand shake just a little, or was it his imagination?
“We could take our coffee outside to the back porch,” he suggested.  “I always like a breath of fresh air after a big meal.”
Erwin immediately pushed back his chair.
Once outside, Cedric parked himself on the top porch step and leaned against the wrought-iron railing, which was painted in black enamel, contrasting with the house’s all-white exterior and picket fence.
“Sit down, sit down,” he urged the younger man.
“I just picked up this suit at the drycleaners today,” Erwin said.
“Oh for heaven’s sakes, sit down son, the steps are clean.  You can’t be worrying all your life about a little dirt.”
Reluctantly, Erwin sat, doing his best to look comfortable under Cedric’s watchful eye while, if at all possible, levitating above the painted surface.
“Isn’t that better?” Cedric asked.  “You can always brush off your pants you know.”
Letting his gaze wander over the shallow back yard, its perfectly groomed grass and the rose bushes that bordered the fence, Erwin tugged at his shirt collar and sipped from his coffee cup.
“Loosen your tie if you’re uncomfortable,” Cedric suggested helpfully.
“It’s fine,” he answered, with a sideways glance.  “I didn’t know you had such a nice back yard.  I’ll bet you have thirty rose bushes.”
Cedric took a deep breath, savored the fragrant evening air.  “Thirty-seven,” he said.  “I love springtime, don’t you, with the roses finally blooming?”
“Do you take care of ’em, or Theodora?”
“Theodora.  They’re like children to her, always out here fussing over them.  Myself, I wouldn’t have them.”
“Why?” he asked, surprised.
“They’re too much work, like some people I know--never receive enough attention.  You have to water practically every day, fertilize every few weeks or spray them with some evil smelling oil, deadhead and trim them constantly--then there’re the diseases.
“You know about rose diseases?” He asked the younger man.  “I know more about roses and their diseases from Theodora than I do about mumps and measles and chickenpox.  There’s black spot, or rust, or mold or powdery mildew on them.  Then there’re the aphids and the thrips and armyworms--and leafrollers.  It all makes for a good analogy, too--too good, really, for fighting the devil and his pests in the church.  They’re a constant battle.”
“Ummh.”  Erwin’s eyes had glazed over.
Cedric set his coffee cup on the porch.  “The fragrance is worth it all, though, isn’t it?”
“Oh yes,” Erwin answered, breathing deeply of the rose-scented air.
“It’s the same pastoring,” Cedric pointed out.  “Reminds me of Paul, when he said we are a fragrant aroma to those being saved, and the odor of death to those who are damned.”
“Good preaching material,” Erwin said, his head tilted forward and affecting a smile.
“Of course, hypocrites have a smell of their own, too,” Cedric remarked casually.
Erwin’s eyebrows rose and he sniffed involuntarily.  “Talk about hypocrites,” he said, “how’d you ever persuade them to let you use their church?”
“Oh, God has his ways of working these things out for us, brother.”
“I wouldn’t feel comfortable with them white crackers.”
“I wasn’t looking for comfort,” Cedric told him.  “Not to say there haven’t been problems here and there.”
Erwin answered with a barely audible grunt.  He stared into the bottom of his coffee cup, and set it down next to Cedric’s.
“What have you heard about the investigation?  Or are they just takin’ their own sweet time about it?”
“Oh, they’re doing all right,” Cedric said.  Leaning back, he scratched at his stubbled chin and pretended to search the evening sky for its first stars.  “Not that it matters much, really.”
“How do you mean?”
“I still have to do as I preach.”
“Meaning?”
“‘Forgive as your Father in heaven forgives, and you shall be forgiven.  Pray for your enemies and bless those that persecute you.’  Abundantly clear, isn’t it?”
A twitch crossed Erwin’s face.  Feigning a sigh, he pushed himself to his feet.
“Think I need to stretch my legs a little,” he said.  Once he crossed the lawn, he made a pretense of examining the roses more closely in the deepening twilight.
“They do have some good leads on our arsonist, I’m told,” Cedric commented from the porch steps.
“Oh?”  Erwin bent over at the waist and tugged at a red rose.
“Yeah.  Seems there was a white car seen leaving the church after the fire started, and some folks saw the same white car a couple of days later, with somebody in it taking pictures.”
Erwin’s back stiffened.  “Really,” he said.  He sauntered to another bush and pulled a variegated yellow rose to his nostrils.  “Lotta white cars out there.”
“That’s true.  You know what the police tell me?  They tell me criminals often like to return to the scene of the crime.  Something about they like to gloat over their handiwork--can you believe that, perversion like that in a man’s heart?”
Erwin continued to sample the roses, sniffing at them as though he were a renowned expert on their individual fragrances and might be expected to comment shortly upon the merits of each.
“They’ll be accusing one of the brothers any day now, I suppose,” he said.
“From what I hear, they put their hands on the man’s pictures and that’ll about wrap up the entire case.”
Erwin hissed and drew back from the roses.
“You all right, brother?” Cedric asked, hurrying across the lawn to join him.
Erwin sucked at a finger pierced by a thorn.  “Stuck myself,” he muttered.  He looked up and gave the older man a scowl.  “Why’d you ask me over for dinner tonight anyhow, Cedric?”
“Just wanted to bless you, brother.  Just wanted to bless you and Sister Sharese.  Do you need a Band-Aid for that?”
“No, you know I don’t need no Band-Aid.  A man would have to be a real sissy to worry about a little ol’ bite from a rose bush, now wouldn’t he?”
Cedric raised one hand in a non-committal gesture.
“I should be saying goodbye anyhow,” Erwin told him.  “There’s a meeting with my elders tonight over something real important.  They’re talkin’ about raising my salary.”
Mutely, Cedric watched as Erwin mounted the steps to the porch and let the screen door slam behind him.  A minute later, Theodora appeared.  Cedric had reseated himself, his back to the house.  His coffee cup was stacked on top of Erwin’s.
“Cedric, what was that all about?” She demanded.
“They gone?” He asked, his gaze on the sky.
She looked down at him accusingly.  “Yehss!”
He was silent, offering no explanation.  She sat beside him, and he put his arm around her shoulders to draw her close.
“Wasn’t that a nice dinner?” She demanded.  “And isn’t Sister Sharese a sweet girl?”
“Uh-huh,” he nodded.  “And it was good for you and you were having yourself a good time.”
“So why did you have to go and ruin it?”
“Just lettin’ the Lord do His work, I s’pose.”
She sighed.  “Chapter and verse.”
“Romans 12:19-20,” he said.  “Avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, ‘Vengeance is Mine; I will repay,’ saith the Lord.  ‘Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink; for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.’”
Her eyes widened in surprise.  “Him?” She asked, putting two and two together.
“Sad to say, it’s looking more and more like it.”
“Do the police know, Cedric?”
“Didn’t I just tell you, Theodora, it’s in the hands of God?”
Sparks flew from her eyes and her breath came in short gasps.  She would have withdrawn from his encircling arm, except that he held on tighter.  Gradually, as he watched, she regained control of her emotions.
“Just the same, I’d rest easier if I knew the police knew it too,” she said.  Clucking her tongue, she added, “I never did much like that boy.”
Gathering up the coffee cups, she rose and went to the screen door.  “Such a shame, that nice, sweet girl married to that piece o’ work.”
“Theodora.”
“Yes?”
“I don’t want you telling anyone else about this.  Not even Teddy.  Do you understand?”
“Let God handle it?”
He nodded.  Admirably, he thought, she managed to shut the door behind her without slamming it.  For a long while, he gazed up at the evening stars, grieving not for his own flock and the loss of a building but for the soul of a gifted young man slowly eaten away by bitterness and hate.  Finally, Theodora returned and called for him to come inside.
He sat for another half hour, deep in prayer, until he felt convinced God would deal with Erwin as He saw fit.  For both the young man’s sake and those who followed him, he hoped Erwin’s resistance would be short-lived.  Though certain of God’s mercy, he knew just as well that God cannot be mocked, that a man reaps what he sows.  If Erwin continued in his ways, especially in preaching hate, he might one day find himself in the hands of the God who is also a consuming fire.
#
A small square of paper greeted him from under the windshield wiper of his Cadillac the next morning.  Rather than wait till he reached his temporary office at Flowers Baptist, he read it in the privacy of his car under the dome light, while the engine warmed.
Rev--
Since you didn’t kill him last night, I’m hoping a certain priest wasn’t spilling the beans to another priest about Scotland Yard’s activities.
“Barriers to righteousness” come to mind.
Sherlock
“What on earth--?” He muttered in surprise.  For a brief moment he felt stunned, as if struck hard between the eyes.  Recovering himself, he snapped off the dome light with one hand and refolded the square of paper with the other to shove it into his suit coat.  He glanced around, worried someone might have seen him reading the note, then snorted derisively.  This early in the morning the street was as empty of life as a mausoleum.  Who would understand the note even if they were to read it?  For a second or two, it had been too obscure even for him.
He wondered where on the street Chance Odoms had parked last night and in what sort of vehicle, to see Erwin entering and exiting the house.  What must the man have been thinking while he waited for their little supper party to end?  Had his imagination run wild with visions of murder, even as Theodora and Sharese traded recipes and he held forth on rose diseases for Erwin?
“What’s the answer, Jesus?” He whispered in prayer, as he put the car into reverse and backed it from the driveway.  Had he obstructed justice, put up “barriers to righteousness,” as Chance expressed it?  There was no denying he had told the man the investigation was closing in on the arsonist and that his film was incriminating evidence.
How to negotiate the thin line, though, between cooperation with civil authority and divine authority?  Civil authority was derived, even established by divine authority--there was no questioning that biblical truth in his mind.  What he questioned, though, was how divine authority meant to mete out judgment; would it necessarily involve the machinery of civil authority?  Or would Heaven judge apart from civil authority?  What about when civil authority commonly abused its powers toward a certain minority of the populace?
Reverend Champion smiled as he parked his car as usual in front of Alliance Baptist.  Not because he felt he had adequately settled any of the questions of divine and civil authority, though.  He smiled at the irony of the situation, how those officials investigating the fire were likely ignorant of a power higher than their own, one interested enough to involve itself in a case of arson.  He doubted they would even acknowledge the existence of the divine authority.
As for him, the divine authority was no less real than the civil authority with its buildings in Calneh and Montgomery and Washington.  It didn’t matter that the divine authority was located in Heaven, in a celestial city unseen by human eyes.  He had read the Book and experienced enough of its truths to trust in the King who ruled it eternally and yet concerned Himself about the affairs of men.
He was mistaken, though, to think that no one in civil authority would so much as acknowledge the divine authority.  The truth was, there were those who would be awfully disappointed if the divine authority failed to help them bring a certain arsonist to justice--surely, burning a church provoked Heaven’s attention.
They probably would have been surprised at Rev. Champion’s answer to such an assertion, and at how much more complicated the situation was for him, too, than it was for them, and not just because of the questions regarding divine and civil authorities.



****



Chapter 28

Rev. Willimon looked guiltily over his shoulder before he took the red and white can of 3-in-1 oil from his jacket pocket and gave the brass lock a squirt to loosen up its inner workings.  A moment later he inserted the key and found it turned smoothly.  Step one, he thought to himself.  So far so good.  Now for step two.  Old paint covered the door hinges and filled the spaces between door and frame.  After three lunges with his shoulder, each with more weight thrown into it, the paint split and he was able to force his way in.  One last, cringing look backwards, to make sure no one had seen or heard, and he closed the door.
An involuntary shudder went through him as cobwebs settled around his head.  Madly swiping at his face and hair, he immediately regretted what he was about to do.  He hated spiders and was sure they hated him, having engaged them in battle for as far back as he could remember.
Be a man, he told himself.  They’re little bugs, they’re more afraid of you than you are of them.  Still, he hesitated, unmoving in the dark, like a climber momentarily paralyzed by unreasoning fear at a great height.  Truth be told, he wasn’t much fonder of pitch blackness than he was of spiders.  Spiders in the darkness, waiting for him to advance, like lions lying in wait...
He shook his head and told himself he was being ridiculous.  He did not fear the dark, it was a Thursday night in Calneh, he stood in an unused stairwell in his own church, and a few little spiders weren’t going to stop him from doing what he had to do.  He swung out with his left hand in search of the wall, and recoiled at sudden resistance that felt like a thick, gauzy film made of air.  The place was thick with spiders and their webs--spiders with venom-dripping fangs, spiders with hour glasses tattooed on their backs, spiders now sprinting up his sleeve in a race to bite his neck--
“Shut up,” he muttered.  There was a light switch here somewhere.  It couldn’t be as bad as his fears told him.  There probably wasn’t any black widow spider in residence, and there probably wasn’t any family of furry tarantulas lying in wait, either.  (He thought of the tarantulas now because he had once seen one as big as a dinner plate in Mexico, and ever since then whenever he thought of spiders the memory eventually surfaced--usually sooner than later.)
Shoulda brought a flashlight, a voice nagged.  But of course there was no need for a flashlight when a light switch was nearby.  He pushed on with his left hand and scrabbled along the wall for the switch he knew must be there.
But it wasn’t.  Slowly, his temper was rising.  Who’d built this place?  Didn’t they know where a light switch should go?  Giving up, he tried the opposite wall.  After several frustrating moments of gritting his teeth against his anger and his fears, the switch came to hand.  Light as yellow as candlelight shone down from the top of the first landing, loosing incredible relief through him.  Eyeing spider webs and gingerly knocking them aside, he started up the stairs.
At the same instant, the light blinked.  Instinctively he leapt upwards, vaulting steps, and stumbled, falling forward, barely bracing himself with his hands as the light went out.  Thankfully, it stuttered back to life, flaring redly like a smoldering wick.  Less thankfully, before he could regain his feet it went out, accompanied by a quiet pop!
He was in darkness, caught between floors, his mind suddenly racing.  In the dim light he had seen a profusion of more webs.  Crawling, he came to sit on the landing.  In the excitement of the moment, he hadn’t felt his shins impacted by his fall, but now he did, and in the darkness he moaned.  As the pain faded, his imagination grew, teeming with furry tarantulas, black widows, brown recluses.
Something scurried across his ankle, and he nearly shouted.
Mice! he quickly reassured himself.  It had to be a mouse.  Had to be!  No spider was that large.  Images of Bilbo in Mirkwood flashed into his mind and of dwarves stung by spiders to be hauled up like beef carcasses into the trees.
Slowly, he regained control of his breathing.  The chills down his back lessened, the images fading with them, to be replaced by questions and self-accusations.  Did he really have to do as pressured by certain people in his own church and in the denomination?  Was it necessary to spy on Cedric’s Thursday night service?  He was the shepherd, as Cedric had said, wasn’t he?  Why should he worry about what the denomination thought, when they were part of an independent denomination not controlled by a hierarchy of officials in some faraway denominational headquarters?  Hadn’t the elders taken a vote?
As he continued to sit there, rocking himself in the darkness, he began to feel very stupid.  The truth was, if he looked deep within, it wasn’t only the denomination or a handful of people in his own congregation who were the problem.  As the weeks had passed, and now nearly three months, nagging voices in himself had joined in with those voices outside himself.
So what was he to do, turn around, crawl back downstairs in the darkness?  Or should he go up, finish what he had begun?  Why not just sit in on Cedric’s services and listen as he pleased?  Or would the black congregation think he was spying on them?  Wouldn’t they be right?  Worse yet, he worried he might feel like some weird specimen of humanity, one white man in a sea of black faces... when in actuality there were people from his own congregation, a handful of them, who stayed every Sunday after his own sermon was done for the day.  (Deep in his heart, he knew those few white faces wouldn’t reassure him all that much.)
What is wrong with me, God, that I feel this way?  What’s wrong with the world that I have to skulk about my own church to listen in?
He heard no answer, whether audibly or through the still small voice that is a whisper within the heart.  But then, why should he expect to hear an answer to what was abundantly obvious?
“You could do this Sunday, instead,” he whispered to himself.  But no, the music and singing reverberated through the church walls, seemingly calling him upwards, ordering him to mount the stairs and go about the business of what he had come to do.
If only he had stayed for the service that first week, after welcoming Cedric and his congregation to Flowers...  But he had felt like it would be an intrusion that day, too, like they might feel he was sitting in judgment on the way they did things.  Still, there was the matter of doctrine... some people insisted Cedric was not as Baptist as he said.  He should see what the man really taught, shouldn’t he?
Are you gonna climb the stairs or turn and run out of here? He asked himself.
His mind made up, he stood and found the wall with his left hand.  No railing--maybe that was why the stairwells had been closed--for safety reasons?  No.  The extra balcony seating simply hadn’t been needed for years.  He inched forward, right foot extended in search of the next set of steps.  Flailing the air with his right hand to clear the way of spider webs, he rushed to the second landing.
His eyes watered and he felt his air passages closing up.  Tomorrow, first thing Friday morning, God willing and the creek don’t rise, he would sweep and vacuum the stairwells.  Years of dust had accumulated on these stairs, centuries of dust, it seemed to him.  Breathing through clenched teeth, he searched for another step with his foot.  A loud report echoed in the stairwell, dry wood cracking under his full weight.  He froze for an instant, the noise echoing in his mind if not in his ears.  Had someone heard?  Were those footsteps?  What if someone ran to investigate?  He waited, frightened at the intake of his own breath and the pulse of blood in his ears.
Music drifted through the enclosing walls.
The top of the stairs couldn’t be too far distant.  How many spider webs?  he wondered, as he resumed his climb.  That was his real question.  Brush one aside and two replaced it, sticky silk clinging tenaciously to face and hair.  His skin crawled and prickled again at the thought of spiders.
If he’d been a cursing man, this would have been the time for it.  He gnawed his tongue as he reached the third landing, the darkness bearing down heavily upon his shoulders.  Crazy thoughts popped into his mind like popcorn in a hot kettle: Cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.  Finally, as he approached the fourth landing, a ray of hope appeared.  Light shone thinly around a door.
O God!  He nearly shouted aloud in relief.  Yanking the door open, he burst onto the balcony.  He could breathe again!  Gyrating crazily, he beat at jacket and shirt and pants and ran both hands through his hair to dislodge spiders and their webs.  Several seconds passed before he realized the music and singing had disjointedly ground to a halt.  In the time it took for him to raise his eyes from his shoes to look over the balcony railing, the silence seemed to have stretched into an eternity.
O God, no, he moaned, feeling the blood drain from his face.  Suddenly faint, he raised his hand and waved half-heartedly at Cedric, who stared at him from behind the pulpit, eyebrows arched and forehead furrowed in a startled expression.
Quickly recovering, the black minister looked toward the piano side of the stage and raised one hand to direct his congregation in song.  “Why don’t we begin with verse one again, Brother Sampson?”
When Rev. Champion looked again, eyes gravitating to the balcony, Rev. Willimon had vanished.  What on earth was the man up to, he wondered, and why the lunatic windmilling?
John Willimon landed at the bottom of the stairs and was on his way out of the church.  As they say in the South, his face hurt.  He felt he wouldn’t be surprised, come tomorrow morning when he looked in the mirror, if his face was scorched red from sheer embarrassment.
Instead of turning in at the gate, when he came to his house, he walked on by.  As sure as the day is long, his wife would discern something wrong the moment he stepped through the door.  He kicked himself as he walked around the block.  He could hear her wheedling now.  Not that he had done something immoral or unethical--well, maybe unethical, now that he thought about it, that is, if you were fussy or super technical.
If he didn’t want to explain himself to his wife, though, how would he possibly explain himself to Cedric?
Well, Cedric, it is my church, and I felt it incumbent upon me to spy on you and your congregation.  There have been rumors, you know.  We can’t have you doing anything fanatical or teaching false doctrine, now can we?
He shook his head and kicked himself again.  What a fool he’d been! Why couldn’t he have simply asked Cedric if he would mind him sitting in on a few of his services?  Why did he have to go and make a complete buffoon of himself?
Thinking back, he wondered if Cedric had been the only one to see him on the balcony.  He didn’t think the pianist had, intent as he was on his music and following Cedric’s lead.  Of the half dozen elders seated on stage, he wasn’t at all sure.  While they were positioned at a bit of an angle, it wouldn’t have taken them much effort to turn their heads to follow Cedric’s gaze up at the balcony.  But the curious thing about Alliance’s elders, now that he looked back upon the moment forever seared into his memory, was that the men’s eyes were closed.  Now, why would that be? He asked himself.  One or two of them even had their hands raised, as if in a posture beseeching God.  He would have to talk to Cedric about that.  First, he wanted to know why people would have their eyes closed when singing hymns, and if it was fanatical, he would have to do something about it.  He couldn’t very well have fanaticism raging through his church.  Well, not his church.  His church building.  He was responsible for whatever went on in Flowers Baptist--whether it was among his own congregation or that of the black congregation.  Flowers Baptist had been put into his hands to oversee, and oversee it was what he would do.
After three long, miserable trips around the block, he went in at the gate to his yard.  He shook out his jacket and examined it carefully under the porch light for spiders.  He was standing there, mentally preparing himself, when the door opened without warning.
“Open sesame,” he joked, and immediately walked past Carol to the hall closet.
“I was wondering where you were,” she said.  She looked on anxiously, as he draped the jacket over a hangar and placed it beside his black raincoat.
“Nothing to worry about,” he answered with forced cheeriness, at the same time studiously avoiding her gaze.  “Nothing at all.”
She frowned, her lips compressed instinctively in a straight, motherly line.  “Jonathan Louis Willimon, you tell me right this moment, what is wrong with you?”
“What?” He cried in surprise, his face hurting all over again.



****



Chapter 29

Startled by a loud noise, Reverend Champion looked up from his morning devotions.  Was someone breaking into the church?  Surely 7:00 was too early to expect John Willimon, who was not one to arrive before 8:00 or 8:15.  Besides, the man’s office was on the opposite side of the building.  Well, it couldn’t be a burglar or someone of that ilk, he decided.  At least he didn’t think any burglar worth his salt would possibly make such a racket.  It was as if the person, whoever it might be, wanted to be heard.  As Cedric was about to rise from his chair to investigate, someone knocked on his office door.
It swung open, revealing Willimon in blue jeans and an old, paint-spattered chambray work shirt.  A light bulb peeped from a shirt pocket.  In one hand he awkwardly clutched two brooms, in the other a Hoover vacuum cleaner.  He grinned lopsidedly.
“Sorry to bother you this early, Cedric.”
“Oh, no bother, Brother John,” he answered politely, giving him the once over.  “Just spending time with the Lord.”
“Oh--oh I’m sorry,” he stammered.  The man’s just spoke volumes.  “I wanted you to know it’s me here so early, rooting around in the broom closet, so you don’t have to worry any.  I’m cleaning the stairwells to the balcony today.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, I thought I better, with you possibly needing the use of the balcony soon.”
“Ah,” he said, the light dawning in his eyes.  “I suppose that’s why I saw you on the balcony last night.”
“Weell... yes!” He agreed too eagerly.  “As a matter of fact, I wanted to see if it’s still usable, you know.  Mostly I just ran into a lot of spider webs and dust balls.”
“The balcony will hold how many people?”
“About 120.  That should be sufficient, don’t you think?”
“Sufficient?” He asked, brows knit in thought.  “We’re not quite filling the sanctuary now.  I’m not sure why you’re concerned about us adding a balcony.”
“Oh, well just to be prepared, you know.  Things keep on like they have, you’ll need those extra seats in no time at all.”
Cedric steepled his fingers and momentarily rested his chin on them.  He glanced reluctantly at his open Bible, at long passages highlighted in yellow.
“If you allow me, John, I can help you later, in an hour or so, when I’m through here.”  He brightened, and looked at him hopefully.  “Or you could let my church janitor do the job when we’re ready to use those seats you’re talking about--there’s no rush, is there?”
“Oh, no, I wasn’t looking for help--” Willimon protested, backing up and inadvertently dropping both brooms.  Turning crimson, he bent over to recover them.  “It’s something I want to do, really it is, Cedric.”
“Ummh.  Well, thank you for letting me know and all.  It’s kind of you to--to notify me like you have.”
“Oh, sure.  Anyway--you just go back to your prayer time.”
Cedric watched, remaining seated while the struggle with brooms and vacuum cleaner went on, followed by Rev. Willimon’s awkward exit.  Frowning, he went to the door and eased it shut, once again wishing for his old office.  When thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly, was the admonition he practiced, at least weekdays.  It was much easier and simpler to do in the privacy of his office than anywhere else.  That was why he had for many years been at Alliance Baptist by 5:30.  There he could read and pray without distraction to himself or anyone else.  Because of his habit of reading aloud from the Bible and praying with unrestrained fervency, at home he would have disturbed his wife’s sleep.  Besides, by 8:30 or 9 in the morning, when calls started coming in from the congregation and the church secretary buzzed him on the intercom every few minutes about every concern under the sun, it was too late for practicing the type of personal focus that would bring him in tune with the Spirit and carry him through the day.
Seeing Willimon in his mind’s eye, he shook his head with regret.  Obviously, in spite of his objections, the man expected him to help with the cleaning.  Why else two brooms?  Reluctantly, he closed his Bible.  As a guest of Flowers Baptist, how could he do anything less?  The fact it interrupted his personal time with God didn’t matter, nor that it was irritating, quite frankly, to have someone intrude upon his schedule.  He was reaching for the doorknob, when he heard a quietly spoken “No.”
No? he wondered.  “No,” came the answer, this time insistent.  Having learned to obey that inner voice long ago, he returned to the desk and his Bible.  He was a guest of Flowers Baptist, yet God evidently didn’t think that was a proper reason for interrupting his prayer time.  Still, he couldn’t feel completely at ease about the matter--John was cleaning the stairwells to help him and his church.
Continuing his prayers quickly became a struggle.  Not even the fact he didn’t need the extra seats helped to assuage his conscience.  He had been clear with the man, hadn’t he?  Still, he didn’t feel an ounce better.  It didn’t matter, either, that his own congregation paid their fair share, that they weren’t freeloaders, and that they had pitched in to improve the building in the weeks--could it really be months?--since their move to Flowers Baptist.
He shook his head at himself.  He knew God’s leading and all the reasons he shouldn’t feel bad about not helping with the stairwells.  Nonetheless, it troubled him deeply, proof of just how treacherous the conscience could be at times.  Which made for good sermon material.  Healing The Conscience.  A good title, he thought.  No.  Instructing The Conscience.  Even better, how about Training Up The Conscience In The Way It Should Go?  He smiled to himself, feeling buoyant and on the verge of forgetting his dilemma.  Wonderful, how the Holy Ghost brought him his sermons every week.
#
Genuine guilt is not a welcome guest even in the heart of a righteous man.  Perhaps it should be said, especially in the heart of a righteous man, and even less so to one who feels lower than a snake’s belly.  What does a seared conscience, one that no longer acknowledges right or wrong, care about guilt?  A tender conscience is quite another matter; it turns not simply a pointing finger, but a brutal fist, upon the right sort of psyche.  That’s why he, Jonathan Louis Willimon, felt his heart fall into his shoes the second he took his leave from Rev. Champion.
No time for guilt, though.  Just throw up a steel door in the soul.  Stumbling and bumbling to the stairwell, burdened as he was by janitorial gear, he rushed to the scene of the previous night’s debacle.  With the door open and hallway lights on, he charged up the stairs, clearing the way of spider webs new and old with a broom in either hand, like two swords cutting through enemy defenses.
Next in order of business was to screw in a fresh light bulb, followed by more fetched from the supply closet to replenish yet other fixtures with empty sockets or burned out bulbs.  Then the real business began, which he prosecuted with a vengeance.  Starting on the highest landing, he stabbed his broom into all corners and swept like a madman, whisking away floor paint along with accumulated dirt, forcibly throwing paint chips and dust balls high into the air, from which they all swirled onto the steps below.
No doubt, faith can move mountains.  But a bitter spirit can accomplish a lot of work in a short time, too.  Quickly, far sooner than he thought possible, he stood at the bottom of the stairwell, panting from his exertions, shirttail held to his face to keep from inhaling the airborne dirt sifting from above.
Even as he stood there, he thought he heard a faint knock on the door.  Then, John?  His imagination.  He knew it had to be, as he plugged in the church’s ancient Hoover and hurriedly flipped on the switch.  It roared to life with the high pitched whine of a jet engine, echoing from wall to wall of the cavernous stairwell, noise enough to drown out unwanted voices, especially a certain still small voice.  As if that wasn’t enough, he began to hum, first with mouth closed and then with it open, the sound rising quickly, to match the vacuum cleaner in intensity, until a mournful wail issued from deep in his belly.  It was the only way to truly shut out the voice and along with it every thought he might think--otherwise, he would have to deal with it, it being his conscience.  One little crack in his defenses, and the guilt would rush in like a tornado.
Still groaning miserably to himself, he unplugged the Hoover, gathered up his cleaning implements, and rushed up the stairs to cross the balcony to the opposite stairwell.  When he pulled the door open, light flashed across his eyes from the darkness below.  As he ventured further, he thought he saw it again, this time as if it swung at him from the opposite direction.  The Hoover and brooms dropped from limp hands.  It swung past once more, before it flickered and dimmed, finally vanishing from sight.  It was as though he looked down a dark tunnel, with a train disappearing into the distance.  He blinked, forgot to make his childish noises, and wiped the sweat from his eyes with the back of his shirtsleeve.  There it was again!  He thought he saw a departing train and heard the roar of its whistle in his ears.
But trains don’t come and go at the bottom of a church stairwell.  He had never seen a vision in his life and in fact didn’t believe in such phenomena.  And yet, he knew he had just seen one.  Not only that, he understood what it meant.  Kicking the brooms and vacuum cleaner aside, he sat down and buried his face in his hands.  Maybe he was a candidate for a stroke?
No.  He knew the truth, that he was in danger of losing a certain moment.  Did he really want to do that?  Once gone, would it ever return, pass his way again?
Sitting there, he could feel the storm against the steel door of his soul.  He might push thoughts from his mind but the Holy Spirit, he was learning, could speak without words if He really wished to communicate with a certain stubborn someone.  Jesus could knock loudly on the door of a heart--or of his conscience--to put it another way.
“Why am I keeping you out, Lord?”  He whispered into the darkness.  He didn’t hear any audible answer.  He knew without it being said.  Pride, simply pride.
He sighed deeply, pushed himself to his feet, and groped his way blindly down the stairs without attempting to find a light switch.  By the time he reached bottom, cobwebs clung to his body with ghoulish abandon.
“God I hate to be wrong,” he muttered, in what was not really a prayer.  “Do you think you can forgive me, Lord?”
He found Cedric’s office door was open.  Ruby Barnes, Cedric’s secretary, stood in front of his desk, discussing last minute changes to Alliance’s Sunday church bulletin.  At the sound of his footsteps, she turned with her customarily warm smile, and shrank back as if horrified by his appearance.
“Reverend Willimon!”
“Miz Barnes,” he said, ignoring her questioning stare.  He focused on Cedric.  “Do you have a minute?”
Reverend Champion glanced at his watch and smiled curiously at him.  “Sure, brother, sure--if you don’t mind, Ruby?”
Ruby veered warily around him, careful to avoid brushing against him in her navy blue dress.  She closed the door behind her.
“It’s not like we have a confessional, us being Baptists and all,” Willimon said, uncomfortably shuffling his feet.  “But if you don’t mind, I’d like to get something off my chest.”
“Do you want to take a minute to wash up first?”
Rev. Willimon looked down at himself, at dusty shirt and pants and the dirt on his hands, and felt the cobwebs in his hair and down the back of his neck.  He shivered as though doused with ice water.
“Yeah,” he said, rushing to the door.  As he threw the door open, Ruby bolted aside with a yelp, barely saving herself from being run over.
Clutching her heart, she guiltily looked Cedric’s way and closed the door.
As John threw water over his face, he marveled at how slippery the slope was that he had traversed, how innocently begun, too, to his mind, plunging him into a game of deception that led another person to believe a lie.  Not an outright lie, but a lie nevertheless.  And it had been two persons, not just one he had deceived.  He had not exactly told the truth to Carol, last night, when she interrogated him about what he had been doing at the church, either.
#
One thing for sure that Rev. Willimon had learned from his theological studies was that to God, sin stinks.  The Old Testament prophets had always been of enormous interest to him, especially the scene where Zechariah recorded Joshua the High Priest appearing before God in filthy robes.  Those filthy robes, he knew, represented sin; he knew also that the translators, for decorum’s sake, had sanitized a Hebrew word that was closer to excrement than dirt.  But looking back on his own sin, excrement was not how Rev. Willimon thought of his attempt to spy on Rev. Champion’s services and the lies it spawned.  He may have felt like it, if you’d asked him, but he was thinking more along the lines of sin stinking like rotten fish.  What an immense relief it was, admitting to Rev. Champion (who he more and more called Cedric) the reason for his strange and abrupt appearnce on the balcony last night, and an even greater relief to find that Cedric understood, both in terms of guilt and his thought processes.
“I think the best thing would be you joining us for church this Sunday,” Cedric told him, his brow wrinkled in thought.  “You’re welcome to sit on the dais with my elders.”
Willimon stiffened.
“That too much for you, John?”
“I was thinking of somewhere in the back row,” he admitted.
“You really do want people to think you’re spying on them, don’t you?”
The white minister contemplated his options.  He didn’t want anyone to think he was spying or that he was racist, but he had another problem he didn’t like to share with anyone.
“Something else?” Cedric asked.  Like any good minister, he was skilled at reading faces.
“Well--”
“Another confession?”
“I often wonder why God ever called me into the ministry,” he answered, looking sheepish.
“What?”
“I don’t like being on stage, it makes me feel like people are staring at me.”
Cedric grinned.  “Makes it difficult to preach, doesn’t it?”
“At least I have a pulpit to hide behind.”
“What, you use that thing?”
“I’m sorry, pardon me?” John said, lurching from his chair.  “The pulpit is sacred, as any Baptist can tell you.”
“Well, this Baptist uses it to hold the occasional note, or to read announcements from, but I seldom ever preach from it.”
“Y-you--” he spluttered.  “You don’t preach from the pulpit?”
“No.”
“But it’s the focal point of the gospel!” He argued, drawing closer to Cedric, who stared up at him from his chair.  “That’s why it is placed center stage.  To abandon it is to abandon the gospel--brother!”
Brother was an afterthought, but he said it as persuasively as he could.
Cedric ignored the finger shaken under his nose.  “I thought the cross of Jesus was the focal point.”
The finger was withdrawn.  “F-figuratively, you know what I mean.”
Cedric picked up his well-worn Bible from his desk and held it out to him.  “Read to me of thy holy and sacred pulpit that I too may preach from it.”
Consternation crossed Willimon’s face.  Words seemed about to form on his lips but died in an unintelligible stutter.  He handed the Bible back to Cedric.  “I-I th-think you enjoy making people look like fools.”
“No,” Cedric said gently.  “But sometimes foolishness has to be pointed out.”
Willimon reluctantly resumed his seat.  “You make me look as bad as--as bad as Roberts Robertson.”
“At least you don’t make it worse by arguing when you’re wrong.”
Too embarrassed to meet Cedric’s gaze, he glanced around the office.  Its solitary shelf was filled with the few volumes someone had managed to recover of Cedric’s library from the fire.  There were pictures of Theodora and their two grown sons, too, and an African-themed throw rug in orange and black and purple on the linoleum floor.  A variety of freshly cut roses from Cedric’s Theodora were on the desk.  By comparison, his own office was starkly cold.
“Some people would argue about how they were too poor in Bible times to own pulpits,” Cedric pointed out good naturedly.
“I thought of that,” he admitted.  “But it sounded too stupid even to me.”
“Sister Stella and her son usually stay after for our services.  You could sit with them.”
Bemused, the white minister nodded his head in assent.  Ironic, to think he was invited to a service in his own church and he didn’t want to go.



****



Chapter 30

It was close to noon when Cedric left Flowers Baptist and headed toward Alliance, where he chose to park his car daily.  Despite the ruins, with his car there the neighborhood understood he would one day return to preach, that there was a tomorrow to look forward to and a past to leave behind.  As he walked, struggling in his own mind to balance the difference between people, his lips were pursed in restrained laughter: on one hand there was Brother Erwin and on the other there was Brother John.  Now there was irony!  One man could burn a church down guilt-free: another man could tell a fib and feel like he was the world’s worst sinner.
Three young boys were guarding his Cadillac.  He wouldn’t have recognized them as guards (except they told him so), since they were lackadaisical about it, one leaning his bicycle against the car and watching as the other two swooped back and forth in front of him.
He almost shooed them away, like he might shoo swallows away from the church as they attempted to build their nests in the eaves.  But that was before the church had burned down.
“Men,” he addressed them gravely.  “Why are you out of school?”
“Don’t you know, Reverend?” Asked the boy leaning innocently against the car door.  The minister found it difficult not to grin at him.  It was one of the Culbertson boys, and on Flowers Avenue all the children called him Mouse because of his buck teeth and because his ears stuck straight out through shaggy, collar-length brown hair.  “They done give us a half day off, with the holiday comin’ tomorrow.”
Memorial Day, he meant.  “They gave us a half day off, son,” he corrected him, unable to resist.
“I’m happy they done give it to you, too, sir,” the boy responded politely.  “Guess I can go now, don’t have to guard your car no more.”
The boy rode off, his friends joining him, all three racing away on their bicycles.  Too late, Cedric realized he hadn’t asked why they thought they should guard his car.  But he didn’t need to ask.  Boys hadn’t changed so much from his own childhood that he didn’t know they could guard a fort against Injuns one minute and fight Martians in the next.
It surprised him to find his car door was locked.  He didn’t remember locking it, and in fact seldom ever felt the need to do so.  While the neighborhood had its share of rundown houses, it was not the slum that some people thought it was and serious crimes were rare.  It wasn’t like he would leave his car on the street with the engine running--any fool knew that would be inviting trouble--especially with young boys around.  But there’d never been a problem leaving the doors unlocked.  Maybe the boys had taken it upon themselves as a precaution?
He changed his mind as soon as he saw the large manila envelope on the driver’s seat.  He powered the windows down to air out the car before bending back the metal clasp.  Inside were a half-dozen 8X10 glossy prints, the first of them a building engulfed by flames, his own Alliance Baptist.  The others, he knew without looking at them, would be nothing more than a variation on the same theme.  There were also smaller photos, of a man inside a white car, with the charred ruins of Alliance in the background.
Re-closing the envelope, he glanced across the street at the Ayers place.  The pergola’s vines were in leaf, offering excellent protection from prying eyes.  He could barely make out someone’s knee.  Sighing, he left his car and crossed the street, envelope in hand.
“I wondered if you wouldn’t just drive off,” Chance Odoms said in greeting.  He ground out a cigarette under the heel of his shoe.
“It crossed my mind,” Cedric admitted, waving the envelope to clear cigarette smoke from the air.
“Sorry, Rev.”
He seated himself on the plank bench opposite Odoms.
“So,” he said grimly.  “What’re your intentions?”
Chance reached inside his suit coat for his pack of Camel cigarettes, but thought better of it, seeing Cedric shake his head in disapproval.  “I guess that’s the $64,000 question, now isn’t it?”
Cedric remained silent.
“You know how it is that I’ve earned my reputation for solving murders in this town?”
The minister hesitated, surprised at the change of subject.  Some people were of the opinion that Chance Odoms was skilled mostly at planting evidence.  Perhaps now was not the time to mention that little fact.
“No,” he said, “but I am interested in finding out how you mean to connect the dots here.”
“It’s all a matter of knowing who’s mad at whom, simple as that--at least on your side of town.”
Cedric’s nostrils flared.
“I know you think that’s racist, Reverend--”
“How could it not be racist?” He rumbled.
“Simple,” he said, reaching again for his cigarettes.  He flipped open his battered steel lighter, emblazoned with USMC and the seal of the Corps.  His eyes swiveled until they met Cedric’s.  Reluctantly, he closed the lighter and dropped it back into his pocket, the unlit cigarette still dangling from his lower lip.
“Sorry,” he apologized.  “It’s a filthy habit.”
“Go on.  You wanted to explain how you’re not racist.”
“It’s the way it is.  On your side of town, most times somebody finds himself murdered, everybody knows who was mad at the poor bas--at the poor man,” he said, catching himself.  “It makes everything easy for me, when all the clues and all the fingers point in the same direction--not that everyone just comes out and volunteers information, mind you.”  His eyes glittered with self-satisfaction.  “There are always opportunities to make use of my skills at reading people.”
He took the cigarette from his mouth and examined it closely.  “Now on my side of town, things--people, I mean, are more deceptive.  A woman kills her husband, say.  Instead of doing it in a fit of rage, she plans for months, maybe even years, and when everything looks great to the neighbors and all--blam!  He’s dead but she couldn’t have done it.  Everyone knows they had a model relationship.
“I dig a lot more, take more time, you see what I mean?”
“More dirt, I guess,” Cedric answered, still unsure of where the conversation was headed.
“In general terms, yes,” Chance said.  “Some people--”
“Mine or yours?” Cedric interrupted.
“Mine,” the detective said.  “Some people are better at hiding their feelings, at concealing the evidence, are cleverer at deception.  Other people--yours, I mean--don’t seem to hide their feelings so much.”
Cedric waited patiently, recognizing Chance had finally worked his way around to revealing what he really wanted to say.
“That’s what was different about this situation, originally, other than it not being a homicide case.”
“Ah,” Cedric said, nodding his head in understanding.
“You didn’t have enemies I knew of, no one was immediately aware of anyone who was angry with you.”
“No jilted lovers, nothin’ like that?”
“I hadn’t thought of that, Rev,” he said, squinting in mock seriousness.  “Do you have something to tell me?”
“Just wondering how far you were goin’ with this, if you were hopin’ for something juicy.”
Chance had been playing with the unlit cigarette as they spoke, passing it back and forth between his hands, but now he crushed it in his fist and let it drop to the ground.
He shook his finger in the air for emphasis.  “Without the usual signs, so to speak, I woulda been stuck.  That’s why I started sitting out here at night and coming by any hour I could in the daylight with my camera those first couple days, watching for suspicious activity.  As you know, that’s how I caught Erwin on film the morning you and I met here.
“Once I had my suspect, all I had to do was ask around to see if anyone remembered him in particular having words with you or if maybe there was some kind of long-standing feud I’d missed hearing about.”
Cedric pursed his lips and shook his head in denial.
“Maybe you weren’t feelin’ it on your side,” Chance said.  “But there were people who witnessed him cursing you right here in front of your church.  That kind of thing doesn’t go unnoticed.
“And after talking to your brother-in-law, I could place Erwin here the night of the fire.  He remembered seeing him before the practice and he remembered a white Chevy was still in the parking lot when he drove out, too, even if he didn’t necessarily remember it was a Monte Carlo.”
“So what happens now?”
“Like I said, that’s the $64,000 question.”
“And?”
“It depends on you.”
“On me.  Really.”
“That’s right,” Chance said.  He patted the manila envelope.  “You know, it wasn’t easy, laying my hands on copies of Erwin’s pictures.”  His gaze turned to the street.  “The worst part was the wait, hoping he was fool enough to have them developed.”  Unconsciously, he reached into his pocket and pulled out cigarettes and lighter.  Seconds later, he took a deep pull on the filterless Camel.
For the moment, Cedric watched in tight-lipped silence.  “And?” He finally asked the detective.
Chance exhaled a plume of smoke from the corner of his mouth.  “It’s simple, Rev.  While it’s all pretty damning evidence to me, it’s fairly slim, come right down to it.  That is, unless you can supply me with something solid, a real motive.
“Something better,” he said, smiling sardonically at Cedric, “than that he hates me, Calneh’s top homicide cop.
“Rev?”  If he hoped the older man would flinch or otherwise yield in some respect, it hadn’t worked.  “Maybe you weren’t jesting a minute ago, maybe there was something between you--you and that pretty young wife of his?”
Cedric shook his head in disgust.  “You always seem to know what’s happening on Flowers.  Is that what you think?”
His eyes glittered in response.  “Well, Cedric, not really.  Considering the hours you keep--unless maybe she was creepin’ over here mornings, while you were supposed to be in prayer?”
He exhaled smoke and glanced down at the cigarette in his hand as if surprised to see it.  Scowling to himself, he continued smoking.
“There has to be a motive somewhere,” he insisted.
Cedric remained gravely silent.
“If my crack about your prayer time offended you, it was just a crack--sorry.”
Rev. Champion sighed gloomily.  “You look in the mirror every morning?”
“Me?  What’s that to do with the price of tea in China?”
“You killed his brother.  Maybe you can’t see it, but it really is as simple as that.  Anyone who’s friendly or halfway civil to someone he hates, that puts you on his list.  Me and my congregation being generally friendly to you, or at least not joining his crusade against you...”
He spread his hands in a gesture to complete the thought, and stared bleakly across the street.
“Not quite what I would like to take to the D.A.,” Chance muttered past his cigarette.
“Huh!” Cedric snorted.  “I don’t believe you’ll be takin’ that to any D.A. in this town.”
“You sound pretty sure of yourself.”
“With the history between you two?  People see your name associated with this case, they’ll know you framed him.”
“Assume, I hope you mean.”  Chance paused, a grim smile cracking his face.  “Until they hear you’re my star witness.  With your testimony I’ll have finally nailed his--his backsides to the wall.”
“You don’t understand, do you?”
“Motive goes a long way in establishing a case, even without an actual eyewitness,” he argued.
Cedric leaned against the pergola’s framework with one shoulder.  “I shouldn’t have to explain, least of all to you.”
“I suppose not,” Chance sighed. “But for the sake of argument, let’s pretend I am too white to understand.”
For someone as observant, astute, and experienced as Cedric knew Chance Odoms to be, he shouldn’t have to explain.  Unless... maybe Chance really couldn’t understand?
“Go ahead, explain it to the white boy,” Chance said.
Cedric took a deep breath before beginning.  “Do you have any idea of how fragile, how wounded, the community is?”
The detective said nothing, instead narrowing his eyes and continuing to smoke his cigarette.
“For me to accuse Brother Erwin would be like--like stabbing him in the back in broad daylight.  It would be--to a lot of folks--the worst sort of betrayal, simple as that.
“Whoo!” He exclaimed forcefully.  “I don’t really think you have any idea of the hatred, and of the suspicions, it would cause between my church and his--and of me.”  He shook his head in refusal.  “No, I certainly can’t do it.”
Chance’s eyes were glittery hard.  “So a man gets away with murder and you look the other way.”
“Not murder.  He burned down a building--maybe.”
Chance clenched his teeth, obviously angry.  “You get my point.”
“Yes, but do you get mine?”
Chance ground out his cigarette beneath his heel, and lit another.  He aimed the smoke toward the street.
“The long and short of it--it’s Calneh,” Cedric said.  “There’s a reputation between the two of you and a long history for all sorts of evil between the white authorities and my community.  You want more rioting, more people hurt and killed because of yet another incident in a long line of incidents?”
“You really think that’s how people would see it?”
“You don’t?”
“I’m looking for answers here, not more questions, if you don’t mind.”
“And if questions are all you can find?”
Chance snorted.  “So where’s justice?”
“So where’s justice?” Cedric repeated, staring at his black wingtips.   He noticed they needed a touch of polish.  “There’s justice, all right, just like there’s always been.  Sometimes we just have to wait till that ol’ sweet chariot swings low, brother.  That’s one thing I’ve learned for sure in this old world.”
“The religious angle, eh?” Chance muttered.  He stared morosely at the confines of the pergola, at its mixture of green and dried leaves and rotting wood.
“From what I’ve seen and from what I’ve read in the Book, sooner or later, it all comes out about the way I would expect things.”
“You know,” Chance said, tapping the envelope beside him, “this could easily find its way into the hands of the ATF or the FBI without my name attached to it.”
Rising deliberately to his feet, Cedric locked eyes with Chance.   “Where were you when it was Klan boys burnin’ down or blowin’ up churches?  Have you thought of that?”
Between puffs on his cigarette, Chance said, “This happened on my street, in my neighborhood.”  For good measure, he pointed a finger at Cedric. “To your church.”
“Well, that’s the easy answer,” he rumbled in exasperation.
“Doesn’t seem easy to me,” Chance replied, peering at the glowing ash of his cigarette.  He sucked deeply on the cigarette, and blew out a series of smoke rings worthy of contemplation.  “You want to know the difference between us?”
“I can think of more than one.”
“Let me give you my take.”
Cedric nodded.
“You’re in the business of seeing people get justified.  Which is as it should be, you being in the ministry.  Me, I’m in the business of seeing them get their just desserts--which is also as it should be, considering I’m a policeman.”
A car horn honked suddenly, a carload of teenagers driving past.  The minister turned and waved.  Distantly, he commented, “It’s how you go about it that concerns me.”
“Meaning?”
“Not everybody you investigate is guilty.”
Chance laughed dryly.  “You’re more cynical than I am, if you really think that’s how I operate.”
“Some people have reason to be cynical,” the minister replied.
As the detective watched, Cedric crossed the street and opened the door of his Cadillac.  A few moments later the engine roared to life and he drove away.  Chance guessed Cedric didn’t think too highly of anonymously handing the photos over to the proper authorities.  Frustrated, mulling his options, he stubbed out his cigarette on the bench and flicked the butt onto the concrete, where there were dozens of others.  He took a deep breath and rubbed his eyes with both hands.  While the ATF had quickly come to a conclusion of arson in the case, in the intervening months they’d failed to develop a single viable lead.  The pictures, he was sure, would break the case wide open for them.  Another score for the good guys.
But considering the circumstances, the labyrinthine convolutions of matters as they stood in the black community and his own relationship to it, particularly with Erwin, maybe leaving things alone was the only alternative.  Maybe justice would stir up a hornet’s nest and result in a lot of innocent bystanders getting stung.  The real hornet, though, was the so-called Brother Erwin.
“I hate hornets,” Chance muttered.  Manila envelope in hand, he levered himself to his feet and headed home.  He didn’t know if everyone felt the same, but he did know that every time he saw a hornet, he wanted to kill it.
Problem was, Erwin wasn’t some hornet he could kill.  Worse yet, as he saw it, as long as Erwin went free and unpunished, he was breeding other hornets.  Couldn’t Cedric see that?  Couldn’t he see that sweeping Erwin’s crimes under the rug would only embolden the man to worse crimes?  Or was it the minister’s intent to use divine justice as an excuse to hide his head in the sand?
A viselike headache gripped him by the time he turned in at his own gate.  Maybe he should quit smoking, he thought to himself.  Maybe he should swear off his twelve cups of coffee a day?  By the time he reached the kitchen, where he threw together a ham sandwich, he had forgotten about the question of coffee and cigarettes.  He lit up a Camel, while coffee brewed on the stove, ignoring Anna Lee’s proscription against smoking in the house.  She was in Chapel Hill for a few days, helping Cecily pack for a year of study in Europe.
He removed himself, with his cigarette, mug of coffee, a sandwich, and the manila envelope, to the back yard gazebo.  Between bites of sandwich and inhalations of tobacco smoke and coffee fumes, he breathed deeply of Anna Lee’s garden.  Probably his imagination, he thought ruefully, after all his years of smoking, that he still had a sense of smell or taste.  Not for the first time that day, he wished he could kick the habit.  Too late in the day to start now.  Maybe tomorrow.
He had slipped a broad-tipped, black felt pen into one pocket while he was in the kitchen.  Now he took out the marker and wrote a name on the envelope in large block letters.  The street address, once he polished off the ham sandwich and returned to the house to dig up a Calneh phone book, would go on later.  As much as he hated to admit it, Cedric was right; he couldn’t turn the pictures over to the D.A., and he couldn’t turn them over to the ATF or to the FBI or the Fire Marshal’s office, either.  But if he couldn’t send the pictures to them, there was still someone to whom they could be sent.  Certainly, there was at least one person in Calneh who should find them interesting.



****



Chapter 31

Everything bothered John Willimon about Cedric’s Sunday morning service.  First, most everybody there was black, and he wasn’t.  Not that he overtly disliked blacks or held anything against them--it was just the matter of being different from them and them being different from him, and him surrounded by so many people who were not his kind.  Later on, he thought himself an idiot, considering they were no less human and that he knew the scriptures, the New Testament anyway, which said racial and ethnic and gender and social differences were of no consequence to God.  But, for goshalmighty’s sakes, they were different, and he wasn’t blind!  Which pointed all the more to the fact that God is Spirit and searches out the heart of a man, while frail, sinful human beings judge by what they see with their eyes.
The color differences were not the only ones that disturbed Rev. Willimon.  It seemed everything they did was different.  As much as he had acknowledged his own foolishness about the pulpit issue to Cedric, it was still uncomfortable for him to see the preacher step out from behind the pulpit and pace about like a caged lion while delivering a sermon.  Actually caged was totally inapt since, even more disturbingly, the preacher sometimes stepped down from the stage and walked the aisles while preaching.  For some reason the man felt it necessary to be closer to his flock, or it was a theatrical gesture better left to--to theatre!  Quite frankly he couldn’t decide which it was, though he did have to admit to himself that the congregation seemed greatly moved by these displays.  As for his own congregation, he instinctively knew people would have run for the exits.
The music, like the crowd’s responsiveness to the preacher’s preaching (which was not necessarily of the 3-point sermon kind, another bone for him to pick), was much too loud, too, even boisterous.  And did they have to stand so much?  He knew he didn’t like standing for all the hymns in his own services.  Standing was for the choir--let the congregation rest.  And people clapped along with the music, some of them shouting and moving about like they were dancing.  Couldn’t they keep all that to the privacy of their homes, or more likely the dance hall?
And what was with all that business of raising their hands and singing with their eyes closed?  Even worse, he knew the musicians could not have learned how to play in a church setting.  At times the pianist played all sorts of riffs and flourishes that no white man, certainly, unless it was Jerry Lee Lewis, would ever think to play.  His eyes almost bugged out, when he realized a set of drums and various guitars had been brought in for the service.  Wasn’t all that thumpa-thumpa-thumpa straight from the jungle?  That was a real problem.  Obviously, he would have to talk to Cedric about it.  And as far as the songs went, they seldom used the hymnals.  Everybody seemed to know the songs by heart, songs that for the most part he had never heard before in his entire life, and were more like choruses that seemingly sprang into existence for that very moment.
The offering was probably the worst part of the entire service.  It was much too showy.  One of the elders stood up and made a plea for the people to come forward to lay their tithes and offerings on the altar, which in his church was the communion table.  To his amazement, everyone surged forward at the same time, until Cedric was forced to ask the people to come by rows.  John Willimon had never seen such a display in his life, especially the exaggerated strutting of some of the men, as they walked across the front of the church to lay down their dollars or checks.  He did have to admit to himself, though, that the tactic, as he thought of it, had impressive results.  From where he sat, it looked like there wasn’t a square inch of table that wasn’t covered with money.  A lot of singles in there, maybe, and fives, but nonetheless covered.
Except that it was so obviously open to carnal display, he would have considered taking offerings the same way in his own congregation.  Too bad, he thought.
The altar call unsettled him just as much.  For every service he held in the church, he always concluded with an appeal for people to come to Christ, to come forward and be saved.  But when Cedric made his appeal, those that came forward came with weeping and wailing.  Did they have to be so noisy about it?  It seemed to him that only lunatics had responded, though of course even lunatics needed salvation.
“Wasn’t that lovely?”
“Pardon me?” He turned to his left, where Stella sat with her son Angel.
“Wasn’t the service lovely?” She repeated.
He nodded, at a complete loss for words.  Around them the congregation was breaking up, milling about the sanctuary, or clustered in groups seemingly unwilling to leave the building.  In his own services, most people had cleared the building within five minutes of his concluding remarks.
Gradually, in the span of half an hour, the surrounding pews emptied, though isolated knots of people remained, some conversing and others in obvious postures of prayer.  Somehow, Cedric knew to leave him undisturbed.  Finally, the last stragglers left, and he became an island unto himself.
Feeling wrung out, he took a handkerchief from his back pocket and ran it over his forehead.  At the same time, there was something in him that felt absolutely exhilarated.
He couldn’t know the black congregation, watching his responses throughout the service, had determined that the white minister was a colossal dud.  What they couldn’t know, in turn, judging him from the outside as they did, was that he had been changed and that those changes would reverberate throughout his life and ministry for years to come.



****



Chapter 32

The gilt-framed dining room mirror revealed a nervous Sharese, as she made doubly sure the breakfast silverware was placed at just the perfect distance from Erwin’s plate.  Thankfully, his usual 90-minute sojourn in the bathroom wasn’t quite through, leaving time for repair of her hair and makeup, if anything was amiss.
“I’m lucky--so blessed--to have him,” she corrected herself, checking the mirror.  She grimaced, lips parted to inspect her perfect white teeth, to make sure she had not misapplied her lipstick.  “Blessed, so blessed.”
Maybe if she said it often enough and convincingly enough, she would begin to believe it herself.  Wasn’t that what Erwin preached, that you could create your own reality by the words you spoke?  She hoped he was right.  It wasn’t easy, two perfectionists living in the same house.
The chiming of the oak wall clock warned her it was 8:00, time to serve breakfast.  Within seconds, Erwin would make his entrance.  True to form, he was in his seat when she returned from the kitchen.  She was careful not to splatter grease, as she removed his eggs with a metal spatula, the yolks as hard as rubber, like he preferred, from the pan and placed them on his plate.
Appraising her appearance as she served him, he smiled thinly.  “Good morning.”
She dished out his fried potatoes from a serving dish on the table, along with a thick slice of ham, and anxiously searched the table.  What was wrong?  The silverware was properly placed, he had his buttered toast on a bread plate, his crystal salt and pepper shakers, Tabasco sauce, coffee, sugar and cream--with a start, she realized she had forgotten his morning paper.
“I’m sorry,” she said lamely.  “I’ll bring it right now.”  She would have fibbed, said the newspaper hadn’t come yet, but a fib didn’t work too well if used too often, and made things worse on the days it really had not yet come.  He had begun eating before she returned, paper in hand, slipping the rubber band off and unfolding it for him.
“Here it is, darling,” she said, voice pitched sweetly to make up for her mistake.
“Ummh.”  He took the paper without thanking her and began to scan the pages, front and back, turning them quickly, pointedly ignoring her.
She wanted to ask him what he was searching for but instead sat down and laid her napkin across her lap.  Head bowed, she mumbled thanks, knowing he had already said grace without her.
She took a dainty bite of potatoes, not really enjoying them.  Since childhood she had loved fried potatoes smothered in ketchup, but Erwin disapproved, said it was low-class to eat potatoes that way.  How he had come to that conclusion she didn’t know, unless it was because of growing up dirt poor himself.  Her own father, a college professor, and her mother, a bookkeeper, had never disparaged her love of the marriage between potatoes and ketchup.  Unfortunately, she no longer lived in her father and mother’s house.
“Did you find what you’re looking for?” She asked.  He turned another page, the rustle of papers his only response.  Unconsciously, Sharese lay her hand across her belly and felt the tightness there.  She had wanted to tell him of her suspicions last week after their dinner with Rev. Champion and Theodora, but after he’d stormed from their house she had been too afraid to bring up the matter of missing her period.
“I thought I’d try Sister Theodora’s stroganoff recipe tonight,” she commented.  She knew it was the wrong thing to say almost before it had popped from her mouth.  Her breath caught in her throat as the rustle of pages ceased.  While the upraised paper concealed his facial expression, his whitened knuckles betrayed him.
The moment passed without comment, and he resumed his search.  She was able to breathe again, to go on eating, with difficulty gulping down her eggs and potatoes.  She eyed the remaining slice of ham and wondered if she should eat it.  Perhaps she was eating for two?
Erwin folded the newspaper and rolled it as neatly as it had come, as only a former, experienced newspaper boy could do, and slid the rubber band back on.  He set it beside his plate the same as every morning, and slid his chair out and replaced it, snugging it against the table.
“Did you really like that slop of Theodora’s?” He asked.
She glanced up, startled by his question.  She braced herself and would have shot back a rejoinder, but the malice she saw in his eyes, before he spun away, left her speechless.  A cold sensation emanated from her heart and spread into her limbs.  She heard him as he went from room to room, slamming a succession of doors, and wished he had left for the morning.  Not for the morning only, she told herself.
“By the way--” he said, upon his return to the dining room, with black leather briefcase in hand.
Cautiously looking up, she thought she didn’t care what he might say.  Again, she wished only that the moment was over and he was out the door and she could be by herself for a few hours.
“Last night--” he paused, gauging the impact of his words.  “Last night I noticed you’re lookin’ fat, woman.  You should do something about that.”
Satisfied his arrows had struck their mark, he left.  The front door slammed behind him.
Finally.
He actually relished the fact of her imperfection and enjoyed his cruel remark.  She could still see his lips curling into a sneer, as he told her she was fat.  For a minute or more she sat as though stunned by a physical blow, wanting to burst out in tears yet unable to do more than whimper.
Perhaps it was the ham, drizzled in honey, calling out to her from the serving plate, that broke the spell.  Reaching with her fork, she slid it onto her plate.  She cut it into several pieces and shoved them one after another into her mouth, chewing methodically, deliberately, not enjoying it in the least.
So he thought she was fat, did he, that she should do something about it?  If that was what he wanted, she knew how to oblige him.  There were old recipes of her mother’s that she thought she could never again allow herself to try, among them fudge brownies and German Chocolate Cake, and fudgie s’mores and coconut macaroons, and--well, the list went on and on.  She could bake for hours and have the kitchen counters and dining room table filled with samplings of the leftovers by the time he returned from his duties at church.
#
Erwin smirked as the screen door closed behind him.  The smirk remained, too, as he snatched the magazines and other mail from the black enamel mailbox bolted to the brick facade of his house.  The magazines would give him something to read at the office while he waited for calls to come in.  He placed the briefcase on the passenger seat of his white Monte Carlo and dropped the mail on top.  Whistling tunelessly, he went around to the driver side and opened the door.  He continued to whistle as he backed his car from the driveway.
Whistling always seemed to help him think.  Maybe it was time to make his next move, expand his horizons, he decided.  He was sure many of Cedric’s congregation really didn’t like the idea of sharing facilities with Flowers Avenue Baptist Church.  A few well-placed phone calls would begin the exodus in short order.  Could be he should have made those calls earlier, but at that point it had seemed too early, like it might raise suspicions.  By now, though, enough time had passed for Cedric’s flock to see how really miserable it was to beg from whitey.  At first the exodus would be a trickle, he figured.  But once they told their friends and had a chance to hear him preach, the trickle would quickly turn into a real gully-washer.
It might be smart to invite Cedric to preach a time or two, he told himself, as he swung the Monte Carlo into the church parking lot.  Divert the old boy’s suspicions by making him feel good and at the same time show the community a united front.  Maybe take an offering or two for Alliance’s rebuilding--that would be a good gesture.  Yeah, two offerings, that should do it.  With the majority of Alliance attending his church, which was barely two miles from Cedric’s burned out hulk of a building, the added tithes and offerings would quickly make up for the loss of income from one or two services.  Now that was foresight, he grinned.  If they rebuilt Alliance, which he doubted, an old has-been like Cedric would never win back anyone but the old timers, people in their walkers and wheel chairs, people so dyed in the wool and loyal that he wouldn’t want to keep them as a part of his church anyhow.
Exulting in the fact he wouldn’t be stuck with a Chevy much longer, he pulled the keys from the ignition of his Monte Carlo.  With the added tithes and offerings he could move up to a Cadillac or maybe a Continental.  He went around to the passenger side to slide out his briefcase and the mail stacked on top.  In his happy preoccupation, the mail slid out of his hands to the pavement.  A gust of wind caught several letters and blew them across the parking lot, forcing him to chase after them before they could end up in the street.  He muttered and scowled, all too conscious of how undignified he must appear to passersby.  By the time he returned to his car, letters in hand, beads of perspiration had sprung out on his forehead.
Afraid his voice might carry to the street, he cursed under his breath.  He had scuffed his shoes in his wild scramble for the mail.  What was worse, he had stumbled on the sidewalk and gouged the toe of his right loafer.  If it was one thing he detested, it was shoes that didn’t have an absolutely perfect shine to them.  You could never really bring up a proper shine from scuffed or gouged leather, even if the soles of the shoes were stamped with those all important words, Made In Italy.
The magazines and heavier envelopes still lay where he had dropped them.  Among them, there was a large manila envelope addressed to him in block lettering.  An inexplicable thrill of fear shot through him as he picked it up.  The postmark was Calneh, no return address.  Not from any business, that was certain.  Block letters, in black felt marker, no less, made it seem like somebody wanted to deliberately disguise the handwriting?
He bent back the clasp and tore open the flap, anxious to see the contents.  He recognized the pictures at once; hadn’t he just picked up the same ones from the developer last week?  The additional pictures, which someone had taken of him as he admired Alliance’s skeletal remains, put his heart in his throat.  His hands trembled as he shoved the pictures into the envelope and grabbed his other mail along with his briefcase.  Suddenly, his bladder felt ready to burst.  He ran for the church, careless of his precious shoes, hoping desperately that the secretaries had left the door unlocked.
“Thank God!” He cried, violently throwing open the door.
At the far end of the building, startled secretaries and a church janitor remarked among themselves that it was surely the sincerest shout of praise they had ever heard from Brother Erwin.
On the street a gray, nondescript sedan pulled away from the curb and took the next turn toward Calneh’s city center.



****



Chapter 33

It didn’t matter how weary Theodora was from the day’s activities (made up mostly of visits to sick church folk laid up in the hospital or confined to their homes, and a stop at the church’s volunteer-run thrift store for a couple of hours to encourage the workers), as always she was careful to compose herself before she picked up the ringing phone.
“Hello?”
It didn’t matter she felt limp as a noodle and that her feet were dog tired, that she needed a few moments of respite, perhaps a cup of tea or coffee, and to fix her makeup and put a brush to her hair.  She had learned early in the ministry that a false note in one’s voice or the lack of a smile, even if the party on the other end of the line couldn’t see it, was apt to start tongues wagging and fingers pointing or bitter complaints.  The pastor and his wife were cold and distant, or maybe they had been fighting, or if they couldn’t get the victory, then who could?  The list was endless.  People were fickle, people were easily offended, people were angry at all sorts of things.  Some of them just wanted to gossip, some of them wanted to know why this or that couldn’t be fixed right away, some of them wanted to know why they were always asking for money, some wanted to know why they hadn’t been picked for the choir solo, some wanted to tell what was wrong with the Sunday sermon or the Thursday (formerly Wednesday) night Bible study.
Nonetheless, whatever the situation might be, without that initial smile and the friendly greeting, in person or over the phone, you just couldn’t reach first base.  You couldn’t discover if there was genuine ministry to be done, whether someone needed help through prayer, kind words, instruction from the scriptures, the offer of a few dollars or a meal, or just to be listened to.  A friendly smile and a cheery greeting at least opened the door, and Theodora gave it unfailingly.  A little fatigue wasn’t about to stop her, not when she could always remind herself of the fact that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and His resurrection made the problems of this world pale beside them.  The afflictions of this world were light, compared to the glory of the world to come.
Still, it was a shock to pick up the phone and answer sweetly, only to have a torrent of curses pour from the receiver.  Her body stiffened and her nervous system locked up, paralyzing her so that she could not even squeak out an answer or slam the phone down in the cradle.  It was like one of those nightmares where an evil presence comes into the room and leans over your bed, while you’re powerless to move.
Sudden warmth spread down one leg and snapped her unseen bonds.  She threw the phone at the cradle, not caring whether it actually connected to silence the voice, and ran for the bathroom.  Her bladder had been full when she came through the door of her house and heard the phone ringing.  Now it wasn’t.  She kicked her shoes off and stripped in the shower.  The jets of cool water washed away shame, fear, embarrassment.  But they couldn’t reach where she had been wounded most.
She had dealt with prank phone calls before, some obscene, some silly.  But this one had been far worse than a simple prank call.  Whoever had been on the other end of the phone line, he seemed to have a direct connection with hell itself.  The anger had been volcanic, the rage and hatred beyond description.  She could honestly say she had never experienced anything like it in all her life.
When she came from the shower, she felt close to collapse.  No one except Cedric knew how terribly the fire at the church had affected her, nor that she was the more deeply wounded of the two, especially with the aftermath of the expired insurance so heavily upon her heart and mind, and the demands of the ministry continuing as before, in fact growing, with the drive to rebuild.
She supposed she shouldn’t have let it bother her, she thought, as she patted her face dry on a towel and brushed her hair.  It was just a phone call, some poor lunatic, that was all.  But telling herself didn’t really help; she felt like glass ready to shatter, or like someone whose insides have been clawed by a wild animal.
Theodora went back to the living room, where she had taken the phone call, and sat on the couch, arms crossed over her chest to hug herself for warmth.  Daylight faded, assisted by dark rain clouds, and she didn’t move to switch on any of the table lamps.  Tears trickled down her face.
That was the sort of condition in which Cedric found her that evening, as he came into the house, turning lights on as he entered each room.  He looked at his wife in consternation, and heard the wail of the off-hook signal from the phone.  He placed the receiver in its cradle, before hurrying to the sofa to wrap her in his arms.  A dart of fear passed through his mind--he had ministered to rape victims before, and this seemed to be the same.  But if she had been raped, why were her clothes in order and her hair perfectly in place?
She sobbed uncontrollably against his shoulder.  The phone rang.  At first he ignored it.  But Theodora stiffened in his arms.  He could feel her tremors.  The phone, the off-hook signal.  Was that what this was all about?  Had someone called with news about one of the boys?  Had there been an accident?
He let her go and reached for the phone.  Dread crept down his spine.  “Hello,” he said, his voice husky with emotion.
The screams began at once, obscenities pouring forth like water from a high-pressure fire hose.  He listened until he recognized the voice and then calmly hung up.  The ringer could not be turned off, which made it necessary to slip the phone line from its wall jack.  He regretted leaving her side, but both the kitchen phone and bedroom phone were newer, with ringers he could switch off.
Checking on her after his return from the bedroom, he decided it was safe to leave her alone for another minute or two, at least until he had made the necessary phone calls from his private, unlisted line in the spare bedroom.  Sometimes he used the room to polish Bible lessons or to write the occasional article for publication.  Time permitting, Theodora used the room for her sewing projects.  When he rejoined Theodora at the sofa, she was still trembling.  He used a tissue to wipe tears from her face.
The doorbell rang, and he checked his watch.  Less than ten minutes had passed, about typical in an emergency.  He went to the door and ushered in Teddy and his wife, Rae.  He apologized profusely for the inconvenience, and they profusely refused to accept.
“Where is she?” Rae whispered.
“On the sofa.”
“I’ll make us some hot tea.”
“That would be nice,” he said.  She knew the layout of the kitchen and where everything could be found.  He nodded gratefully, and she left the two men to themselves.
“You sure you don’t need me comin’ along?” Teddy asked.  “Haven’t done any headcrackin’ lately.”
Cedric shook his head and smiled.  “What makes you think there’ll be any of that?”
“Just a feeling.”
“Well forget about it, ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.’”  He glanced at his watch.  “I’ll be back in--in an hour.  Maybe less.  Just sit tight and be prayin’, bro.  Okay?”
Teddy sighed with regret, swung the door open for him, and slapped him on the back for good luck.
“You didn’t park behind me, did you?” Cedric asked before venturing out.
“We walked over.  Now git.  Everything will be fine.  I know I’m itchin’ to hear the whole story, you rushing out like this, Ceed.”
He gave him a grin that he didn’t feel, and walked out to his Cadillac.  Some stories you couldn’t tell anyone, not even to the head elder of the church, even if he was Theodora’s little brother.  As he drove off, he wished he could have sent his brother-in-law in his place; Teddy had played right tackle for Grambling in his college days.  What he was about to do might be more down Teddy’s alley than his own, no matter what the Book said about vengeance.
He didn’t have to honk the horn when he reached Chance Odoms’ house.  Odoms waited at the curb, a rake-lean wraith in the dark, with glowing cigarette in hand.  The detective flicked the cigarette into the gutter before folding himself into the Cadillac.
Cedric glanced over and saw by the momentary illumination of the dome light that one of Chance’s guns peeped out from his unbuttoned suit coat.  Not that a gun was necessary.  Or guns.  He knew Chance always carried more than one.
They were silent all the way to Erwin’s house.  It wasn’t until Cedric pulled to a stop behind Erwin’s Monte Carlo that either of them spoke.
“I could always arrest him, you know,” Chance said.  Out of habit, he patted his jacket to make sure his guns were in place.
Cedric smiled grimly.  “Thanks, I think.  I’m of the opinion that my way is better.  If he doesn’t listen to reason...”
“Right.  Otherwise I’m just along for the ride.”
It was Sharese who answered the doorbell.  Alarm registered briefly on her face, as she recognized the two men, but she opened the door wide instead of attempting to shut them out.
“I imagine you want my--my husband,” she said, bitterness evident in her voice.
Both men glanced at one another, and then nodded.  Flour smudged the tip of her nose and dusted her pink apron, while the smell of baked goods--pies, cookies, candy, maybe even Big Mama’s Everlasting Rolls thrown in--wafted from the interior of the house, threatening to overpower their senses.  They instantly felt their salivary glands kick into high gear.
“He’s in back, probably still dialing, trying to reach you,” she told Cedric.
He brushed past her and disappeared inside the house.  Chance stayed with Sharese, and reached for a cigarette and his lighter.
“Are you here to arrest him, Captain Odoms?” She asked.
He angled his head for a look at her from the corner of one eye, as he exhaled a stream of blue smoke.  She was a strikingly pretty woman, far too lovely, in his opinion, for the snake she had married.  Her question hadn’t been out of idle curiosity; she hoped he was here to arrest him.  What kind of fool, he wondered, was Erwin, that he would turn a sweet-faced creature like this against himself?
He shook his head, and drew deeply from his cigarette, before saying, “I think the Reverend just wants to talk, have a chat with him Reverend to Reverend, so to speak.”
She frowned, pretty even in disappointment, the dark pools of her eyes brightening, as the sound of a scuffle reached them from deep within the interior of the house.  Privately, he felt alarm as a series of thumps reached his ears, as if someone or something had been thrown repeatedly against a wall.  Privately, too, he grinned to himself, as Erwin’s wife raised one hand to her mouth to conceal a smile.
He wondered if Erwin had a clue as to what kind of woman he had married.  “Is he abusive?” He asked.
“Physically?”  She glanced at Chance in surprise and shook her head in denial.  “You know him well enough, Captain Odoms, he does all his dirty work with that malicious tongue of his.  Besides, he knows if he ever did lay a hand on me, one of my brothers would be callin’ on him right after.”
Eaten up with curiosity, Chance figured he may as well go all the way.  “Why do you stay?”  He might more reasonably have been expected to ask why she had married him in the first place, but it was a question he didn’t like, when Anna Lee had heard the same through nearly thirty years of marriage.
She seemed to instinctively grasp the deeper currents behind his question. Untroubled, hand to her mouth as if to hide another grin, she said, “Oh, God’s working on him.”
The religious answer, Chance winced.  He wondered how many times Anna Lee had answered her family and friends in the same way, though she wasn’t nearly as religious as a minister’s wife would be.
“I think God’s working on him right now,” she added, shrinking a little at Cedric’s muffled but rumbling voice.
Chance had a feeling Erwin was the kind that would keep God busy for a very long time.  It would be interesting to see, in twenty years, if his wife had stuck it out with him.  Would she be so willing, if she knew he was the one who had burned down Alliance Baptist?
Buttoning his suit coat with forced nonchalance, Cedric suddenly reappeared with a familiar manila envelope tucked under one arm.  The minister apologized to Sharese for the necessity of interrupting her evening, and left the house.  Chance, giving him the once over, was relieved to see no sign of blood on his hands or white shirt.
If he’d worn a hat he would have tipped it to Sharese before following the minister out; her bearing and personal composure might almost command it of a man.
“It was a pleasure to chat with you, ma’am.”
“I know you don’t believe it, Captain, but he does have his good qualities.”
He didn’t argue the point.  Besides, Cedric had reached his car.  Odoms took one last puff of his cigarette, and dropped the butt on the driveway.  Behind him, the door to her house still open, Sharese fanned the air with her apron in a vain attempt to dissipate the acrid smell of tobacco.
Perhaps accusingly, the envelope awaited him on the passenger seat.  But Cedric said nothing, as Chance set it on his knees for the ride home.  For the next few minutes the silence between them was understandably thick, neither man anxious to pierce it with conversation.
The Cadillac turned onto Flowers Avenue.  In a few more seconds, Cedric would let him off at his house.
Tentatively, Chance said, “Well?”
“Interesting choice of who to send the pictures to.”
“It was either that or arrest him.  And since it seemed I couldn’t arrest him, I thought he should know somebody was watching him.”
“Some might call that blackmail.”
“Think of it more as a kind of lever,” Chance said, brushing aside the implied threat.  “Question is, do y’all have an understanding?”
Chance’s house loomed ahead.  Cedric nodded grimly and stopped the car, double parking in the street.  Fat raindrops plopped on the windshield and bounced from the hood.  High clouds had been pushing in from the Gulf since early in the afternoon.
“Great,” Chance complained, one hand on the door handle.  “April showers in June.”
“The rain falls on the just as well as the unjust,” Cedric quipped in return.
“Well, thank God I’m not made of sugar,” Chance replied.  One look told him the rain did not exactly displease the minister.
“Vinegar, maybe,” Cedric interjected.
“Snails and puppy dog tails, anyhow,” he said, and pushed open the car door.  As much as he had hoped Cedric would spill the beans about his chat with Erwin, the conversation was definitely over, when one started quoting Bible verses and nursery rhymes.
The minister watched from the shelter of his car as the detective walked up the short pathway to the porch of his house, heedless of the cloudburst breaking over his bare head.  Instead of going directly inside, he lit a cigarette and remained under the porch roof, evidently determined to have one final dose of nicotine for the evening.
Chance waved, and Cedric tapped his car horn before pulling away.  As he drove home, with windshield wipers beating furiously in the downpour, his “talk” with Erwin played and replayed in his mind like a picture at the drive-in theatre.  In King James terminology, Erwin had gnashed his teeth when Cedric appeared on the scene.
The man’s curses, as he rushed to his desk, were somewhat less than Biblical.  Fortunately Cedric had seen enough bad movies in his day, even as a Baptist minister, to know Erwin was reaching for a gun.  That was the scuffle Sharese had heard.  In his younger days Cedric might have taken Erwin by the collar and one-handedly shoved him up against the wall to do his talking.  Now, at nearly seventy years of age, it took both hands.  Throwing him against the wall two or three times stopped the girlish kicking.  Those were the worrisome thumps Chance had heard.
The rumbling voice, which Erwin was not capable of, unless maybe demons took possession of his larynx, had also been Cedric--explaining that the time for turning his cheek was over, that if he ever called him again or set foot in his church or spoke one more caustic word to anyone in the city of Calneh, disgrace and doom would fall on his head.  He would make sure of it.  He didn’t care what the fallout might be, he would shout from the housetops what he knew of Erwin’s evil deeds.  And if that wasn’t enough, he would snap his puny self in half.  Did he understand?
Cedric parked his car in its usual spot and locked it, leaving the manila envelope on the seat.  He braved the downpour as heedlessly as Chance Odoms had a couple of minutes earlier.  The storm drain just above the driveway should do nicely.  He reached into his waistband for Erwin’s .38, and dropped it through the iron grate.  It had been unnecessary to ask Erwin a second time whether he comprendéd.  The fear in his eyes had been answer enough.
His clothes were plastered to his skin by the time he reached the door of his house.  Except for the rain he would have brought the pictures in for Theodora to see.  There was no real worry anyone would steal them from the car, and if they should be stolen, he had no doubt Chance Odoms had copies, as probably even the ATF and the Fire Marshal’s office did.  Chance Odoms might have a reputation as a contrarian, but Cedric knew the old homicide cop and ex-Marine was also a man who believed firmly in the chain-of-command.
To his surprise he found Theodora, Teddy, and Rae Ann seated at the kitchen dinette, the room fragrant with the smell of freshly-brewed coffee.  Cedric peeled off his suit coat and eyed an empty serving plate littered with cookie crumbs.  Obviously Theodora had dug into her secret stash.
“Oh you’re soaking wet, Cedric!” Theodora cried.
“I’ll have some of that coffee,” he said, waving her back to her seat.  Gratefully, she seemed her old self.  Headed for the bathroom to change his clothes, he pulled off his tie and started on the buttons of his white dress shirt.
His voice carried to them from the hallway.  “I’d like a few of those cookies!”
Theodora’s eyebrows rose in surprise.  After a brief hesitation, she took a chocolate cookie hidden in her napkin and returned it to the serving plate.  Rae placed one beside it.  Teddy followed, shaking his head in regret.
“If that don’t beat all!” Theodora exclaimed.  “Do you believe that?”
Teddy mournfully picked at the crumbs on the serving plate.  “If I say I don’t, can I have my cookie back?”



****



Chapter 34

Anyone familiar with the right magazines and a handful of indelible television interviews would have recognized the woman who stood at Flowers Baptist’s front door early one morning near the end of June.  The thin overcoat, oversized oval sunglasses, and headscarf were a dead giveaway.  After the initial shock, John Willimon recovered quickly.  You would have thought he received luminaries at Alliance on a regular basis.  It wasn’t until the woman opened her mouth and spoke, that he realized his mistake.  Neither the accent nor vocal intonations so recognizable from her TV appearances were in evidence, and if only the disguise were stripped away, he decided, she probably didn’t look anything like Jackie O.  What remained was a striking loveliness difficult to hide behind a few clothing items and accessories.
“I’m here to see Reverend Champion,” the woman repeated.
Rev. Willimon blinked two or three times more than necessary.  Someone good at reading people would have realized his mind was racing.  First, why would a white woman come to Alliance to see Cedric?  Second, did she have an appointment?  Third, was she trouble?  Fourth, was Cedric’s secretary on hand?
“Is he in?” She demanded.
Seeing that she was close to stamping her foot, he opened the door wider and stood aside.  “I believe he is,” he answered.  “Sorry, I’m a bit preoccupied today, Miss--?”
“Thank you, Reverend Willimon,” she said, brushing aside his clumsy attempt to ascertain her identity.  “Would you be so kind as to show me the way?”
Shocked that she could know his identity while he didn’t know hers, he mumbled something in return and managed to close the door.  So much for his errands...  Both he and Cedric maintained the same policy about receiving or counseling women in the church offices.  The door always had to be left open and someone else must either be present or near at hand.  Usually a secretary served as much for that purpose as for any regular secretarial duties.  Today, Rev. Willimon remembered, Ruby was out with the flu, a fact confirmed by the empty desk outside Cedric’s open door.
Rev. Willimon knocked before entering.  “We have a guest, Reverend Champion,” he announced.
Cedric looked up expectantly from poring over a book.  His greeting was pleasantly professional, as he stood and came around his desk.  John saw instantly that Cedric did not recognize the woman, that he was simply being polite.  Welcoming enough, but polite.
“Did you have an appointment, Miss?” Cedric asked.
She extended her hand, and he shook it.  A tear rolled from under her sunglasses.
Cedric shot Willimon a glance.  “If we may have a little privacy, Brother John?”
So Cedric did know her!  John nodded and whipped around, exiting Cedric’s office as quickly as he could, and in the process failed to hear the woman direct her mumbled thanks at him.  He stopped abruptly in the hallway.  As agreed between them, “a little privacy” did not mean complete privacy.  It just meant he should leave the room and remain at a discreet distance--the secretary’s empty chair would do fine.
The tears couldn’t be a good thing, he thought.  In his experience tears usually meant trouble of one kind or another.  He knew he shouldn’t do it--there was the matter of confidentiality--but he strained to hear the ensuing conversation.  For a while it seemed the woman was the one doing all the talking.  From Cedric he heard an occasional yes or more correctly an ummh.  But in actuality he couldn’t hear more than a snatch or two, husband being the word he heard most often above a general sort of murmur, and baby for another.
Briefly his imagination conjured up the worst possible series of explanations.  This woman was here to blackmail Cedric.  Or maybe to seduce him--why else the scarf and sunglasses on a blustery morning?  What if she wasn’t wearing anything under that raincoat?  Or was she there with news that she was pregnant--?
None of which made any sense, he conceded.  Cedric hadn’t recognized the woman at first, something he had clearly seen in his eyes.  Still, she had to be trouble--women often were.  Beautiful women in particular.  And hadn’t Paul said women should be silent in the church?
He smiled wryly to himself.  He knew more men than women that he wished would shut up once in a while.  There were plenty of situations he could think of that would go much better if people of whichever gender just shut up and listened.
He heard a chair scrape the floor.  Cedric rising to his feet?  Loud sobs reached him in the hall.
“Reverend Willimon?” Cedric called.
John went to the doorway and looked in.  The woman cried into one hand, while Cedric bent over her, his hands enfolding her other hand in a paternal gesture.
“Could you find a tissue for our guest?”
John quickly scanned the shelves.
“None in here,” Cedric told him.
“Oh.”  John retreated to the hallway and hurriedly checked through Ruby’s desk.  In his experience all secretaries kept tissues on hand for emergencies.  He discovered a box in the last drawer he opened.  It was empty.
“Figures,” he muttered.  “I’ll be right back,” he said more loudly, suddenly remembering the box of tissues on top of his part-time secretary’s desk.  He rushed as fast as he could without actually running.
Hurrying back toward Cedric’s office, he crossed paths with the woman.  Tears flying, she dug at her eyes with one hand and held her sunglasses aloft with the other.  When she lowered her hand to replace the sunglasses, he realized he wasn’t any closer to discovering her identity than before.  He let her out the front door and apologized lamely.  If there was anything he could do--?
She neither answered nor looked back, as she fled down the steps.  He stared slack-jawed at the street, still wondering what he’d said or if Cedric had offended her, when she drove her white Monte Carlo out of the church parking lot.  His hand knotted into a tight fist, crumpling the tissues he’d failed to give her.
I think you owe me an explanation, Cedric, was what he felt like saying.  Instead, he heard himself ask, “What was that all about?  She went out of here like she was shot!”
Cedric waved him into one of the two folding metal chairs facing the desk.  John self-consciously chose the one the woman had not sat in.  Cedric watched, chin at rest on his steepled fingers.
“Did you--do something you’ll regret?” John asked.
“Could be,” he answered with a long sigh.
“That woman--” John began tentatively.  “Hiding behind--behind the shield of confidentiality--won’t make it any better, you know.  These things always come out.”
Cedric chuckled.  “You speaking from experience?”
John reddened and shook his head in denial.  “What’s spoken in secret will be shouted from the housetops--that sort of thing.”
Cedric’s steepled fingers traveled upward, until they covered the bridge of his nose.  Sighing again, he dropped his hands to the desk and leaned back in his chair.
“More and more I see it’s every bit as difficult for you to trust me as it is for me to trust you.”
John shifted uncomfortably in his chair.  It wasn’t necessary for Cedric to substitute for you as a white man and for me as a black man.  He understood what Cedric meant without the need for explanations.  A month or two earlier he would have foolishly argued the point.
“Hard to believe but true,” Cedric added, his voice rumbling.  “And I don’t guess I’m any better at confessions than you, either.”
“Brother, it’s not that I don’t trust you,” John said.
Cedric’s frown told John that he sometimes wished he wouldn’t call him brother.  Admittedly, sometimes when he used it there was a hollow ring to the word.
“You think it’s an easy row to hoe, John, going against history, culture, and racism?”
Willimon stiffened, wondering how Cedric so often seemed to have a private view into his inner thoughts.  In a flash he thought of those gospel passages where Jesus knew the thoughts of his opponents.  Had they felt the same kind of discomfort?
“We have to be careful as ministers of the gospel,” John said, his voice trailing off.
“We also have to be careful about confidentiality.”
John nodded.
“But since it’s me doing the confessin’--” Cedric said.  Where to begin, though?  Should he straight out tell him that Sharese’s husband was the one who had burned down Alliance Baptist?  Or should he begin at the beginning--if beginning it could be called--Erwin’s vendetta against Chance Odoms?  Maybe Adam’s sin in the Garden was the real beginning.  But that was probably a little too far back.
Finally, he decided to start with the day Chance showed him the incriminating photos in front of the old Ayers place and to fill in the details as John asked questions.  Half an hour later, as he wrapped up with Sharese’s visit, his voice was faltering, his throat dry with emotion.  Perhaps too startled or astonished that the identity of the arsonist was known and that he was a fellow minister, John had interrupted no more than once or twice.  The description of his confrontation weeks beforehand at Erwin’s house brought guffaws and a few other loud, inarticulate exclamations.  During the whole time, Cedric barely looked at the man, instead staring at either the ceiling or his desktop.  Throughout, his hands remained tightly clenched over his paunch.
“Why don’t you--why doesn’t--what about the--!”  John spluttered, unable to find the right combination of words or, as equally as difficult as it had been for Cedric, to know where to begin.
Cedric waited.
“He’s lucky you didn’t kill him--I certainly might have, if it’d been me,” John settled on.
“I was trying to make a confession, not enlist you in my sin.”
John was vehement in his protests.  “Sin?  What are you talking about?  The man burned down your church!”
“‘The wrath of man does not achieve the righteousness of God.’”
“Yeah, well, sometimes you let the chips fall where they may.  There’re consequences and there’re consequences, you know.  You were helping God out a little--how does that sound?”
“That’s what I’m concerned about, I guess.”
“I don’t get it, I don’t get the point,” John said in frustration.  “I really don’t.”
“He’s leaving the ministry.”
“He doesn’t belong in it!”
“He’s leaving the faith.”
“He was never part of it--let him go and good riddance to the--to the--if I wasn’t in church I’d be cussing about him myself.  Let him go, he’s going out from among us because he was never of us--1 John 2:19.  Is that scriptural enough for you?”
Cedric shook his head and looked bleakly about the room.
“There’s his wife--his church--” his voice quavered.  How many people would fall away because of his departure?  How would his wife and unborn child be affected?
“I don’t have your experience,” John said quietly.  “But from my few years, the way I see it, there’ll always be somebody dragging the Lord Jesus’ name through the mud and people getting hurt because of it.  It’s just part of the--part of the whole ball of wax it seems like.  And when it’s all through, there’ll be some who stand and some who fall.”
John slapped his knees with both hands and stood up.  “Sometimes you have to let go, just let God handle it all,” he said.  “In the end, it all comes out in the wash, that’s about all I can say.”
He went to the door, and turned one last time.  “I hope that helps.”
Unable to find it in his heart to tell the white minister otherwise, Cedric nodded assent.
“Anything you need from the hardware store?” John asked.
Cedric shook his head.  He waited until Willimon’s footsteps died away and he heard the front door click shut, then came out from behind his desk and began to pace the floor, hands raised in prayer.  His confession to John hadn’t helped at all.  While he hadn’t meant to seek the man’s support, it still felt like the result was the same, like he knew ahead of time how the younger man would react and that he’d somehow been attempting to justify his actions.
Even worse, to his thinking, he didn’t feel badly about how he’d dealt with Erwin.  It had felt wonderfully exhilarating to finally take action, to let his anger spill over into the moment, to slam him against the wall and to walk away with the knowledge that he could destroy the man at any time he wished--until Sharese had shown up at his office and bared her soul to him.  Her dark, haunted eyes, shading from violet into black, reminded him that there were other people involved, an entire church, and a marriage at stake besides.  Not just a marriage--a family, if he considered Erwin’s unborn child.
He wondered if Erwin knew about the baby.  The baby was the real reason for Sharese’s visit.  Erwin was leaving Calneh immediately and had laid down an ultimatum for his wife.  Sharese could come along, if she wanted.  If not, he would divorce her.  He had been offered a leadership position with some kind of Muslim congregation in Atlanta and meant to begin a new life for himself.
She felt torn.  She loved her husband but didn’t understand why he had to leave Alabama or why he suddenly wanted to become a Muslim and seemed so willing to throw away their marriage.  Sensing it all had something to do with the night of Cedric’s visit in company with Chance Odoms, she figured Cedric could provide the answers to her questions.
Reluctantly, Cedric revealed Erwin had burned down Alliance Baptist.  A moment later, she burst into tears.  He assumed the dark flush over her complexion was shame.
He didn’t know if Sharese would follow her husband to Atlanta, and doubted she knew the answer herself.  He prayed for her to make the right decision.  Though Erwin was lost, which he didn’t doubt, he felt compelled to pray for him as well.  At the same time, he wondered if he could have done anything differently.  If so, the answer eluded him.  Even to those who gladly err on the side of mercy, there are boundaries that cannot be ignored.  Erwin’s phone call to Theodora had been the crossing of one of those boundaries.
Still, Cedric suffered as he prayed.  It broke his heart that he’d been unable to turn the young man from hatred and vengeance, and it broke his heart that Erwin would further dishonor God by abandoning his faith in Christ.  How many people would stumble because of his failure to lead Erwin in the right path?  How many would stumble because of Erwin’s sin?
Cedric nearly fell into the same chair John had sat in earlier.  Was it his imagination or had he really heard a voice?
“I’m listening, Lord,” he said.
Let him go, son.
“Are you sure, Lord?”
Would you have me enter uninvited?
The picture of Jesus knocking at the door instantly crossed his mind.  Then a second picture, that of a bricked-over doorway.  Briers quickly climbed the bricks, obscuring the former entryway.
Even for someone as articulate as Cedric, it would have been hard to describe the impact of the Spirit’s voice to anyone who has never heard it, still harder to explain visions to those who claim God no longer speaks to His children except through Holy Writ.  But as always, to Cedric, who had heard that voice before, sometimes in comfort, once in stern rebuke, it brought the same finality, the same absolute sense of closure; no matter how simple the message and to the point, or how oblique it might at first seem, it cut away his misery like some kind of heavenly scalpel and at the same time was like the hidden manna given to sustain the weary and troubled soul.



****



Part Five

Chapter 35

Hermione parked Stella’s Ford Galaxie in the corner of the parking lot furthest from the entrance to the Federal Correctional Institution for Women at Owaloosa.  Though the pavement was perfectly level and the nearest car or truck was perhaps fifteen feet away, she set the emergency brake before she opened her door.  There was no use in taking chances, not when the car wasn’t her own; just because the car was bug-splattered and dusty from the 200-mile journey (and about ready to give up the ghost besides) didn’t mean she wanted anybody carelessly dinging it or scratching the paint.
Whew!  The Georgia sun did seem hotter than the Alabama sun, she thought, as she stepped out and went to the rear passenger door.  Ioletta opened the door on the opposite side at the same time.  They both looked in on Stella.
“You all right?” They asked in unison.
Pale with sweat beading her forehead, Stella nodded a shaky affirmative.  In spite of the heat shimmering off the surface of the asphalt, her plaid car blanket was tucked up around her chin.
“Lordy, you look puny,” Ioletta said.  “You sure you all right?  Maybe we could find you a doctor?”
“I’ll be fine, just the flu,” Stella said through chattering teeth.  “Don’t forget the box in the trunk.  I don’t want us to come all this way and forget to give it to her.”
“Lordy, you musta told us that a dozen times in the last fifty miles,” Ioletta complained.  “We don’t forget that easy, you know.  We got brains, too.”
“You’ll make sure you ask her why she never answers my letters, won’t you?”
Ioletta rolled her eyes in exasperation.  It was the same other question Stella had asked a dozen times in the last fifty miles.
“I’ll wrassle it out momentary like,” Hermione told her, walking to the rear of the car.  As she opened the trunk, she wished she had parked closer to the prison entrance.  The box was heavier than when it had contained the Florida oranges advertised on its lid.  Now Bibles and a stack of Rev. Billy Graham’s Decision magazines lined the bottom, plus there was packaged food along with a variety of toiletry items they thought Mertie and her cellmates would find useful.  As she closed the trunk lid, she noted with anxiety that the passenger side of the car seemed lower than the driver side.  A mechanic should look into that, she thought.  Or maybe there was a problem with the tires?
She grinned suddenly, realizing the problem was only her aunt, who was bent over, talking to Stella, her right foot braced on the open door sill.
“You ready?” Hermione asked.
“Ready,” Ioletta answered.  To Stella, she said, “We could leave the keys in the car, let you listen to the radio.”
Stella shook her head.  She felt too miserable for music.
“I hope you don’t plan on dyin’ before we come back.”
“Aunt Letta!”
“Just makin’ sure,” she said.  “It did come on awful sudden like.”
Furrows crossed Stella’s forehead.  She managed a sickly smile.
“We’ll make it quick as we can,” Hermione promised.
Ioletta considerately eased the door shut and pressed against it until she heard it click.
“Aunt Letta--” Hermione began, as they walked toward the prison.
Suspicious of her niece’s tone of voice, Ioletta scrunched her mouth into a frown.  “I suppose you think I should carry the box in this heat, not you?”
“No, no, I’m fine.”
“Well, what?”
“I was just thinking,” she said, letting her gaze wander deliberately.  How to put this delicately?  In her mind’s eye she saw the Galaxie’s door panel dimpling as Ioletta leaned against it.  “Did you ever consider maybe we should go on a diet?”
Ioletta looked startled.  Her eyes swiveled toward Hermione.  “A diet?  You and me?  Now why would you be talkin’ like that?  You know you don’t mean us, you mean me!”
“Well, I could go on one, too.  I don’t suppose it would hurt anything.”
“Hmmph.  Pot callin’ the kettle black.”
“Just a thought, Aunt Letta.”
“Some people should keep their thoughts to themselves.”
“That’s true.”
“The Lord has blessed me and you’re jealous, that’s all it is.”
“I suppose you might look at it like that, Auntie.”
“Auntie?  Don’t you auntie me like I’m nobody.”
“Auntie doesn’t always mean that, Aunt Letta.”
“Well, it did when I was growin’ up.”
They had come to the sidewalk.  For the moment Ioletta forgot her ire.  She took the box from Hermione and told her to follow her through the doors.  If someone refused to let them take the box in for Mertie, they would have to deal with her first.  She had visions of a snarling white man barring the way.
The first guard they met smiled pleasantly.  He was a large man, well over six feet tall, and looked like a younger version of their own Elder Wiggins at Alliance Baptist.
“How are you beautiful ladies this fine day?” He asked.
The women exchanged glances, and grinned.
“That’s right, jus’ like you said,” Ioletta answered, her voice turning to honey.  “Beautiful.”
#
Hermione stood at Ioletta’s shoulder for a clear, unobstructed view of the woman who had taken Stella’s son.  The visitor’s alcove couldn’t accommodate both their chairs, or rather their combined girth, confirmation of her opinion that dieting might be a good thing.  On the drive up from Calneh, Stella had described Mertie Davies as pretty, skinny as a toothpick, a flat one not a round one, fragile with cancer and in need of lots of TLC.  Ioletta and Hermione recognized her immediately, as the gaggle of women prisoners were let in.  What surprised them was that her eyes were not sunken and gray like Stella had told them.  Unusually large, luminous, and blue were more like it, flitting nervously about, as the burly woman guard gestured her to her seat.  They widened, as she suddenly realized she was sitting opposite two black women, both of them complete strangers.
With trembling hands, she picked up the phone on her side of the glass and held the receiver to her ear.  Ioletta had picked up her own phone as the women filed in.
“Hello?”
“Are you Mertie Davies?” Ioletta asked in return, to make doubly sure.  She wished the woman’s prison outfit had a name instead of a number stenciled over her breast.  The voice surprised her; she had expected it to sound coarser.
Mertie nodded her head, and blinked owlishly.
“Stella done took sick.  She wanted I should--I mean me and my niece Hermione here, come in to talk instead.  Is that all right?”
Mertie nodded again.
“My name is Ioletta Brown.”
“I’m Mertie Davies,” she replied unnecessarily.
“We brought you a big box full of stuff.  They made us leave it out front but said they’d pass it on to you once they gone through it all, made sure there weren’t no contryban nor nothin’ like that.”
Mertie smiled stiffly and raised a hand to one eye, where she knuckled a tear about to brim over.
“Why would you do that?” She asked.
“Because it’s what the Lord would want us to do.”
“Ask her if she received Stella’s letters,” Hermione urged her aunt.
“I-I did,” Mertie said, clearly hearing the question on her end of the line.
“Why didn’t you never write back?” Ioletta demanded.
“Ask her if she did what Stella told her to,” Hermione said.
“Let her answer my question first, Miny,” she shot back.
Mertie nodded slowly.  She knuckled her eye again, started to answer but faltered.
Blunt and to the point, Ioletta asked, “You can read and write, can’t you?”
“Not so good,” she said, shaking her head in regret.  Brightening, she laughed suddenly.  “Most people say my handwriting’s no better than chicken scratches.”
“Ask her if she did like Stella said she should, Aunt Letta.”
Mertie nodded.  “I know I should’ve written.”  She looked cautiously around, before adding, “I feel different--somehow.  I don’t know how to explain it, except I feel different--not so all alone anymore.”
“After you prayed, you mean?”
She nodded tentatively, as if she wanted to say more but was too shy.
“That’s the Lord, no two ways about it,” Ioletta assured her.
“There’s so much that’s happened, I just wish I had somebody in here who could explain more to me.”
“Is there a chaplain?” Ioletta asked.  “You could talk to him.”
Hermione’s hand was on her aunt’s shoulder.  “Tell her about the Bibles and magazines, Aunt Letta.”
“There’s Bibles in the box and magazines from the Reverend Billy Graham--you read those real good.  They’ll help.”
“If you think so, that’s what I’ll do.”
For a long moment, Mertie and Ioletta stared silently at each other.
“And pray, pray lots,” Ioletta thought to add.
“Aunt Letta, ask her about the letter.”
“Letter?”
“You know, the one Stella Jo wanted her to write.”
“Oh, you ask her,” her aunt said, handing over the phone.  “I don’t know what to say.”
“Mertie--do you mind my calling you that?” Hermione asked.  “Stella Jo was hoping to ask you to write a letter for her.”
“A letter?”
“To her son Duane.  To ask him if he’ll write.  She’s written letter after letter.”
“He don’t answer none,” Ioletta interjected, pulling at her niece’s arm to speak into the phone.  “She’s written about his twin brother and everything under the sun, and he still don’t answer.”
“Twin brother?” Mertie asked, unsure she’d correctly heard Ioletta.
“Yeah,” Ioletta and Hermione said together.  Hermione asked, “Didn’t you know?”
Eyes widening again, Mertie shook her head.
“The boy’s a cripple and can’t talk, but he’s an angel,” Hermione said.  “Everybody thinks so.”
Mertie covered her mouth with one hand and sobbed into it.
“God’s blessed the boy,” Ioletta said, hoping to comfort her.  Mertie didn’t seem to have heard.  Her eyes were focused elsewhere.
“Will you do it?” Hermione asked, growing impatient.
Slowly, Mertie pulled herself together.  She adjusted her coverall, and nodded her head.  “I can try.”
Ioletta took the phone from Hermione.  “Don’t he read?”
“Not so good, like me, I guess.”
“It would mean an awful lot to her.”
“He’s never been one to write, you know.  He’s only ever written once or twice to me in his whole life.  But I’ll do my best.”
“That’s all anyone can ask.  They--”  Ioletta seemed stumped for words again.  “They treat you well in here?”
“Pretty good, I guess.”  She smiled faintly.  “It’s not like the outside.”
“No, I guess not.  But it was a bad thing you did, stealing a child like you did.”
“I know,” she said quietly, not correcting Ioletta.  The fact she was in prison for reasons other than kidnapping did not make it better.
“Well, we’ll have to be leavin’ now,” Ioletta informed her.  “Stella’s waitin’ in the car.  Poor thing’s not feelin’ too well.”
“I-I hope she’s not too bad,” Mertie said.  “Tell her I’ll be praying for her.”
Ioletta and Hermione smiled broadly.
“I hope you’ll pray for me, too.”
The three women waved and smiled at each other through the glass like they were old friends.  Hermione backed out to give her aunt room to maneuver around her chair.  Suddenly, Mertie tapped on the glass barrier and gestured for them to pick up the phone.
“Yes?” Ioletta said.
“I had a question.”
Ioletta waited.
“I’ve heard the Lord heals--does he really do that?”
“I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”
“It--then that’s what it musta been.  It musta been the Lord who healed me,” Mertie said.
Ioletta’s jaw dropped in shock.
“What is it, Aunt Letta?” Hermione asked.
A tear ran unhindered down Mertie’s cheek.  “They haven’t let me see the doctor yet, but I know I’ve been healed of my cancer.”



****



Chapter 36

There was a chill in the air, that Saturday morning, with leaves beginning to fall at the tug of autumn winds from off the Gulf.  Stella Jo, turning over a new leaf of her own, had risen early to commence upon a program of dusting and vacuuming and straightening.  No more waiting a month or more between cleaning days for her!  Rev. Johnny was to blame: or perhaps one should instead say he could be credited with this new flurry of activity?  Recently, he had begun preaching more than the Baptist doctrine of salvation and was experimenting with thoughts on how salvation should impact the life of the Christian on a daily basis.  Was it a good witness for a Christian to live in a slovenly manner?  Shouldn’t Mr. or Mrs. Christian’s yard be a credit to the neighborhood?
Maybe because the McIlhenny property very nearly abutted Flowers Baptist itself, she took his questions more to heart than most other folks in the congregation.  Maybe she felt his remarks aimed personally at her because of the eyes that seemed to bore into her from around the congregation as he spoke.  Some people, make that many or most people in her situation, would have been offended at such remarks and likely never have darkened the doorway of a church again, considering how people famously take offense in the Church.
Problem was, she didn’t exactly have the cash to do much about the house at present.  A handful of weeks after the trip to Owaloosa, her old two-tone Galaxie 500 had cried uncle and been hauled to the local junkyard, requiring an expenditure for a newer model Ford (a blue LTD with doors wide enough to allow easy access to the front passenger seat for Angel and to accommodate her own sizeable bulk).  And what she didn’t spend on Angel, or her own needs, well, that usually went to tithes and offerings and her efforts to help feed the variously needy people of the neighborhood.  What remained of her bi-weekly paycheck certainly didn’t suffice to make improvements on the house.  More frequent, thoroughgoing cleanings were her only real option, as she saw it.
As she went about cleaning the living room, she every so often peeked anxiously through the front windows.  Maybe she could persuade Angel to work on the yard part of the conviction put upon her by Rev. Willimon’s sermons?  He spent the bulk of most days out there anyhow, now that he had made a full recovery from his awful accident.  Could he maybe clip the grass around his statues, make things more presentable?  She knew he listened to Rev. Willimon’s sermons.  What he thought of those sermons, though, and what went on in his mind as he sat through Sunday morning services, was difficult to say, just as it was difficult to say what he thought of anything else happening in the world around him.
By noon, when she normally would have knocked off for lunch, she felt energized enough by her success at cleaning that she decided to continue for another hour.  Once she had a rhythm going, she hated to lose momentum, especially when she seemed to tire so easily anymore.  Darn, but her fortieth birthday had come a lot harder than she thought possible.  A glance out the windows told her Angel was still working (though he worked slower now at his sculpting than before the accident).  Thank God, she really didn’t have to worry about a repeat of metal slivers in the eye; the ruined eye, the eyelids sewn shut, was covered by a black eye patch like those worn in pirate movies, and he now wore plastic safety goggles to protect his “good” eye.  Several weeks after his return home from the hospital, she had left the house for work one morning and almost stumbled over a package lying on the porch.  Inside it were the goggles--no letter, no note, no signature, no clue as to who had left them.  Like the blocks of various kinds of stone delivered to their yard by some unknown benefactor so many years before, they had appeared without a chance of thanking anyone.  Which meant she was forced to give thanks to God instead and to pray for whoever sent gifts on Angel’s behalf.  Whoever it was, they certainly practiced the scriptural command to give one’s alms in secret, as she thought of these gifts for her son.
“Now who could that be?” She muttered, noticing a long black limousine parked by her front gate.  One didn’t normally see limousines parked on Flowers Avenue, unless one counted the occasional hearse.  A pang of anxiety shot through her, as she racked her brain.  No, she was quite sure she hadn’t forgotten someone’s funeral service, for which she would have played the role of pianist.
An hour later, flush with the success of all the work she’d accomplished, she decided it was time for her delayed lunch.  She must think of keeping up her strength, and there was Angel to consider, too, who forgot to eat unless food was placed before him.  Looking through the screen door to call Angel, she discovered two men in her yard.  They were standing next to a statue of Rev. Champion’s son Mason.  Captain Odoms, in his usual rumpled suit, she recognized easily, though his back was turned to her.  The other man, much shorter and darker, dressed in a suit and a beautifully tailored, unbuttoned camel hair overcoat, was a stranger, stranger still for being an Oriental in Calneh.  Holding onto the screen door, she cocked an ear to listen, suddenly too shy to venture from her house.
Angel labored away with hammer and chisel upon one of his statues, his nose only an inch or two above the surface of the stone, while the two men conversed.  Chance and the stranger bowed to one another.  The stranger approached Angel and squatted beside him.  Stella felt her heart catch in her throat, as her son reached out with one hand and raptly touched the man’s face.
Stella heard the man say something, whether a single word or phrase meant as farewell, she was unsure, since it was not English.  A moment later the man rose and bowed from the waist to both Chance and Angel.  Pivoting on one foot, like a soldier performing maneuvers on a parade ground, he retired to the limousine and was met by the chauffeur, who was dressed in black suit, black shirt, and black tie.
Stella waited until the long black automobile pulled away from the curb before she ventured onto the porch.  Chance, oblivious to all else, stared after the car as it disappeared from view.
“What was that all about, Captain Odoms?”  She adjusted the red bandanna covering her hair and buttoned the top buttons of her sweater before she repeated his name.
“Captain Odoms?”
He turned slowly, and it was then that she saw a sheet of paper in his hand.
“If that’s not the funniest thing,” he muttered in her direction.
She descended the stairs, feeling compelled to go to him, though she had no real idea why.  The sheet of paper was magnetic; she must discover its meaning.  He held it out to her, ornately beautiful stock about twice the size of a normal bank check.
“What is it?” She asked, at the same time taking it from his hand.
“You’d better see for yourself,” he answered.
The first thing she saw were the words, Bank of Tokyo, printed in gold leaf.  The check was written out in beautifully flowing script for Seven Thousand Dollars, and it was addressed to Michael McIlhenny, Sculptor.
“Wh-wh-what’s this f-for?” She stammered.
Seeing the blood drain from her face, Chance took her by the elbow and aimed her toward the steps of her house.
“Perhaps you’d better have a seat first,” he ordered her.
They sat side-by-side on the lower steps.  Her eyes glanced disbelievingly at the check in her hand and then at Angel, sitting in the dirt, still working on his latest project, and then back at the check.
“What I remember of the Japanese lingo from my year over there isn’t worth--isn’t worth spit anymore, if you’ll pardon the expression,” Chance said.  “But as far as I could make out, Angel just sold his first statue.”
Her eyes bulged, and her jaw dropped, not quite able to take in his words.
“S-say, what did you say?” She cried incredulously.
“I said, ‘Angel just sold his first statue.’”
“This is for one?”
“Right--that one of Mason, to be precise.”
She listened, as though struck dumb, eyes riveted to the check, while Chance told her how he had seen the Jap, as he put it, enter their yard.  Being naturally curious, a quality any real detective must possess in abundance, he thought he should investigate.
“It wasn’t long before the negotiations started up,” he said.
“Negotiations?”
“Sure.  Like any self-respecting businessman, he wanted to dicker.  He started out with an offer of $2,500.  Of course, he was jabbering at your son, not me.”
Stella giggled, in her imagination seeing and hearing the man attempting to talk Angel into selling one of his precious works.  All in Japanese, no less.
“When he reached $3,500, that’s when I stepped in.”
Spellbound, she listened as he detailed how he had flashed his Captain’s badge and used what little Japanese he could dredge up from his memory to convince the man that he would act as agent in the sale.
“How did you settle on $7,000?”
“That’s the strangest part of all,” he said.
Her eyes grew round.  “Yeah?”
“When he hit $7,000, Angel turned in our direction.  As clear as day, I heard him with my own two ears, he said, ‘Yes.’ ”
She shook her head in wonderment.
“I’m sure I didn’t imagine it,” he said.
“No,” she said, agreeing with him.  “What was that word the man said, though, when he took his leave?”
“Word?”
“Yes, I heard him say something but it wasn’t what I always heard they say for goodbye.  It wasn’t sayonara.”
His eyes twinkled.  “Samurai,” he said.  “He was using it as a term of respect for your son.”
“Really.  What does it mean?”
“Warrior,” he said.
She giggled.  “Warrior?  Well, I never--do you think he was talking about his eye patch?”
“Maybe,” he said, smiling cryptically.  “The question is, though, what do you plan to do with all that money?”
She glanced down at the check in her hand, her expression one of renewed wonderment.
“You really think we’ll be able to cash it?” She asked.
“Oh yes, I wouldn’t worry a lick about that.”
“Hmmh.”  She looked down at it again.  “It’s so pretty, I hate to cash the thing.  Maybe we should just frame it and hang it in the house somewhere.”
His eyes narrowed, watching her as she raised the collar of her sweater around her neck and deliberately contemplated the check.
“You aren’t serious are you?”
“Well, it is pretty,” she said, pronouncing it as purty.  She stared at her son, listened to the noise of hammer and chisel.  “Hard to tell what he’d want to do with it.”
Chance squinted, patience growing thin.
“I know what you’re thinkin’,” she told him.  “You think I’m crazy, trying to figure out what to do with this money.”
“Well--”
“No matter what you think, I’m still gonna weigh it in my mind and pray about it.”
“All right,” he said, rising and brushing off the seat of his pants.  “Can’t argue with that, Stella.”
He looked back when he reached the gate.  She still stared in his direction, surprised he’d actually used her first name, unadorned of any other title.
“Knowing you, you’ll likely give it all away anyhow,” he called to her.
She frowned as he started down the sidewalk.
“We just might do that,” she mumbled to herself.  “Just depends.”
She stood up, perturbed that he would try to tell her what to do with the money.  She didn’t care if he did carry a badge and a gun, it wasn’t any of his business.  Not that she would have told him that to his face, but she was thinking it.  By the time she entered the house and closed the door behind her, she felt her blood rising.  She halfway threw the check on the living room coffee table.
A few dollars come my way, and in five minutes I’m mad at my neighbor, she thought to herself.  Can you believe that?
Suddenly, she remembered why she’d gone outside.  She went back, descended the stairs and grabbed Angel by the arm.
“Time for lunch, Angel,” she said, exasperated with herself.  They started toward the house, with her supporting most of his weight.
“That’s a lot of money, Angel honey.  Do you really want it?  Do you want to sell your statues?”
He kept walking, saying and communicating nothing, not even that he had heard her question.
“Money does funny things to people,” she went right on.  “Of course, ‘every good gift and every perfect gift comes down from the Father of Lights above.’”
She waited until they reached the top of the stairs before continuing her speech.  “Thing is, you never know which way a thing will fall.”  She looked at him and tenderly brushed dirt from his face.  “I guess I mean I wonder where this will lead to.  I would just like God to be part of it all.”
He nodded at her, humming a tune, and she helped him through the door.
“Not that I can see the devil giving you money.  He’s usually in the habit of taking it away.”
She helped him to the kitchen and turned the water on at the sink for him to wash his hands.  The more she thought about it, the better she felt.  While $7,000 was an awful lot of money, Angel put a lot of work into his statues, too.  Certainly, the laborer was worthy of his hire.  It wasn’t like they were stealing the money.  Still, something bothered her about it.  As she helped Angel dry his hands on a dish towel, she again heard Chance Odoms’ parting shot about her likely giving the money away.
Maybe giving it away was the best thing to do.  Maybe he had said the right thing, something truer than he realized.  Maybe it was a sign from heaven?
“Angel honey, we have some discussin’ to do,” she said, after they finished eating lunch.  She wiped her mouth on a napkin and folded her hands on the kitchen table.  “Maybe God put this money in our hands right now for a purpose.”
There was a familiar sounding rap on the front door.  Before Stella could rise from the table, there were two sets of footsteps coming through the house, the floor creaking dangerously.  Ioletta came in, followed by Hermione.
“Hey!” “Hey.” “Hey!” They exchanged greetings.
The two women sat down at the kitchen table.
“Aren’t you lookin’ racy, in that eyepatch of yours, Angel!” Hermione greeted him happily.
“You’re too late for lunch,” Stella told them.  “But there’s a jar of iced tea in the fridge, if you like.”
“You can pour the tea, girl,” Ioletta said with a nod.  “But you know that ain’t why we’re here.”
“Well, it’s not like I’m planning supper for tonight, so I don’t know why you’re showing up now,” Stella said.  She hid a smile as she pulled out the jar of tea from the refrigerator and picked up glasses from the shelf.
“Oh, you’re cruel, keeping it from us like this, and you know it,” Ioletta complained.
“Well, I don’t know what you could be talking about,” she said, handing them their glasses.  “Do you know what they’re talking about, Angel?”
Hermione smiled, and had a sip of tea.  “Do you think he’d say, even if he could?”
“Probably not, just like his momma,” Ioletta commented.  “You know we’re talkin’ about that limousine.  We just heard about it and thought we better check up.”
“Limousine?” Stella said, as if struggling with her memory.  “What limousine?  Do you remember something about a limousine, Angel?”
“Oh now stop that!” Ioletta cried.  “Little Missy Chrissy from down the street was just telling us how she saw a big, long, black limousine leave here with a Chinaman in it, and how Captain Odoms was here, too.  We know somethin’ be happenin’.”
“Chrissy Dawkins can’t be more than ten years old!” Stella exclaimed.  “What could she know about limousines and Chinamen--who I think, by the way, call themselves Chinese nowadays?”
Ioletta frowned.  “You’re not gonta tell us, are ya?”
Hermione grinned, listening to their exchange.
“Well now, if you ask me nice, Ioletta, I just might,” Stella replied.
“Hmmph.  I’m not sayin’ another word.  I’ll just sit here waitin’ until you spill the beans.”
“That’ll be the day.”
“Jist the same...” Ioletta said, shaking her head.
Stella poured another glass of iced tea for herself and took a sip.  Ioletta’s eyes narrowed with displeasure as she waited.
“How’s Reverend Champion doing raising money for rebuilding the church?”
“Brother Champion?” Ioletta cried in exasperation.  “What’s he to do with your limousine?”
“Just the same, I’d like to know,” she said, steadily eyeing both women.
“I’ll answer that,” Hermione said.  “Not so good.  You know from the beginning he wanted to auction his car off, but the elders wouldn’t let him.  Nobody wants their pastor driving around in a beat up old car or to see his wife walking to the grocery store.”
“That’s right, talk about embarrassin’,” Ioletta threw in.  “You wouldn’t like people pointing at your minister as he drives by in his raggedy old junk heap and saying, ‘There goes the preacher from Flowers Baptist,’ would ya?”
Stella sat quietly, considering Ioletta’s remark for a few moments.  While Rev. Willimon’s car wasn’t a rusty old heap, a shiny green Ambassador sedan was far from the likes of a Cadillac.
“Still,” she began, “it is the middle of October and all you see over there is the foundation’s been poured.”
“A lot of people are out of work right now,” Hermione pointed out.  “It’s not a good time to be axin’ for money.”
Stella smiled coyly.  “I suppose $7,000 wouldn’t be much help, then?”
“Hmmph!  Seven thousand dollars?” Ioletta muttered.  “Girl, if you had that kinda money, don’t you think you should be doin’ something about fixin’ up your own place?”
Stella glanced at Angel.  “It’s not my money.”
“Well, then what are you talkin’ about?”
“The limousine?” Hermione asked.
“Angel made his first real sale today, to a Japanese gentleman, and I think the Lord wants us to give the money to rebuild Alliance.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it!”
“Ioletta!” Hermione cried, offended for Stella.
“Angel don’t even talk,” Ioletta pointed out.  “How’s he gonta sell one of those statues of his?”
“That was what our Captain Odoms was here for,” Stella said quietly.  “He did the selling.”
Ioletta bunched her lips in obvious disbelief.  “Still...”
“The check’s on the coffee table, if you care to look at it for yourself.”
Ioletta frowned, shaking her head, still the skeptic.  Hermione scraped her chair back from the table.
“What you doin’, Miny?” Ioletta demanded.
“I’m having me a look at that check, Auntie.”
“Auntie?  Don’t be callin’ me Auntie, girl.  She’s pulling your leg, don’t you have sense to know that?”
“Maybe.  But I’d still like to see for myself.”
Ioletta rolled her eyes, as if to say, have it your way.  Hermione stood and walked out, careful not to rush, lest she appear undignified.  The rest of them remained where they were, Ioletta tapping her fingers on the table top and frowning, as they waited.
There were sudden, undignified shrieks from the living room.  Ioletta’s jaw dropped.  She rose from her chair as if kicked, and lumbered out.  Moments later, from the living room, there were shouts of, “Praise the Lord!”
“Is that what you want to do with the money, Angel, give it away to help rebuild the church?” Stella asked.
Angel smiled broadly and hummed a tune.  Stella recognized it easily, I Surrender All, for a few seconds joining in without thinking:  “All to Jesus I surrender, All to Him I freely give--
“Then that’s what I guess we’ll do,” she said.  “We’ll just give that money to Reverend Champion to rebuild his church.  It does seem like a sign from heaven, the man choosing your statue of Mason.”



****



Chapter 37

Rev. Champion pulled a bamboo leaf rake from the trunk of his Cadillac and met Rev. Willimon at the front gate to Stella’s yard.  The latter held a shovel propped against his right shoulder, toting it like he was a rifleman on parade.  Cedric tiredly shook his head at the unexpected sight of toilet paper--yard upon yard upon yard of the stuff strung between Angel’s numerous statues, around the railing to the stairs and circling the porch, and threaded between the branches of Stella’s willow tree.  Her Ford LTD was completely papered over, like an Egyptian mummy awaiting its moment to be launched into the afterlife.
Some kid’s brilliant idea of fun, accomplished long after midnight, Cedric assumed.  It had to have been late.  For himself, he hadn’t left last night’s Halloween party (held Friday instead of Saturday to avoid the necessity of cleaning up early on Sunday) until he and John, plus a few youth workers, had finished packing up the portable sound equipment, movie screen, and projector.
Were there teenage marauders, even then, lurking in the shadows with loads of excess toilet paper rolls in hand?
“Kids will be kids,” John said with a shrug.  “At least that’s what I’ve always been told.”
They opened the gate and marched in, prepared to do battle, John in his favorite paint-spattered work shirt, blue jeans, and Converse sneakers, and Cedric in his black suit, white shirt, black tie, and polished wingtips.
To Cedric, Halloween was a blur of images alternating mostly between The Creature from the Black Lagoon or Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy and bobbing for apples, drinking hot apple cider, and playing lots of games with the kids.  It was always good clean fun, and if anyone had doubts about Christians celebrating on a pagan holiday, a youth minister (it being a youth night) read from the Encyclopedia Britannica on the origins of Halloween and how it had been corrupted into a pagan holiday.
Though it was a youth night, nearly as many parents as kids showed up, perhaps mostly to help eat hamburgers, hot dogs, potato chips, Jello salad, and ice cream put out by the church ladies.  On years when Abbot and Costello were in red hot pursuit of the mummy (or vice versa), the youth minister (who’d earlier read from the encyclopedia) crashed the showing in full dress mummification, which few of the kids ever seemed to remember or to anticipate until it was too late.  Pandemonium would ensue.  Last night’s party, the first-ever racially integrated celebration between Flowers and Alliance, had been no different.
“Cedric,” John called softly.
Cedric leaned on his rake and looked questioningly at John, who’d put aside his shovel to pick up stray napkins.  John pointed his chin at a statue well known to Cedric; it was of his son Mason, who in his teen years had taken it upon himself to supervise the neighborhood’s garden plots at Stella’s and to haul in dirt when needed.  Almond-shaped eyes, passed down from Theodora’s grandfather, a full-blooded Cherokee, made the face strikingly different in appearance from any of the others.  A cold wave crashing over his head from the Gulf wouldn’t have shocked him more.  The left arm had been broken off above the elbow.
“What do we do?” John asked in anguish.
Cedric let his rake drop to the ground.  As if he did this every day, he said, “Find the arm.”
With apprehensive glances toward the house, they began their search.  The worst part was that there weren’t many real places of concealment on the property, unless perhaps it was hidden behind another of the statues.  To prepare for the Halloween party, the garden plots had been tilled under several days before, baring the ground of all but scattered drifts of willow leaves, drifts too low to hide anything larger than dried twigs.
“What if they took it, Cedric?”
Cedric shook his head in despair and continued hunting.  What if they had?  The damage was already done, wasn’t it?  Vaguely, he wondered if it was someone’s effort to strike out at him, someone’s idea of vengeance?  The statue was of his son.  Were they trying to send a message?  A warning?
“Do you think somebody broke it off last night?”  Willimon meant during the party.  Had one of their own kids done this?
As they searched, they pulled down streamers of toilet paper.  Wads hung in profusion from Cedric’s arms.  He stuffed them into a trash barrel.
“Cedric?”
“Do you think anybody could just snap it off without us hearin’?” He asked, struggling with his emotions.  “And don’t you think we would’ve noticed it was gone?”  He failed to voice another very real problem, the perception it might have happened during the party.  How would Sister Stella take it?  How would it affect Angel?
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” John said.
They worked their way into the back yard and discovered its two apple trees were festooned with toilet paper, as well.  Cedric went for his rake and came back to knock streamers down and to look among the branches for the arm.  No luck.  He prayed, asking God for help, while wondering what good it might do.  It wasn’t like he could reassemble stone with Elmer’s Glue.
“Under the car, maybe?” John asked.
It was the one place they hadn’t looked--under the LTD’s white shroud.
“If you don’t mind, I’ll let you do the honors,” Cedric told him.  “I’m feeling too old this morning to be down on my hands and knees, scrabblin’ under a car for something that’s probably not there.”
“Happy to, brother,” John said with a grin.  It couldn’t be Cedric was worried about his black suit, now creased with ochre and dusted with bits of leaves.
The morning dew had plastered the toilet paper to the car.  Cedric began stripping it away, and John went down on one knee.
“Eureka!”
Cedric looked incredulous.  “You kidding me?”
Down on both knees, now, John reached in past the rear tire.  He slid the arm out, expecting to see its fingers were broken off and missing.  The arm was much heavier than he would have imagined possible.  It is stone, he thought to himself.  To his surprise, the fingers were perfectly intact.  He marveled at the arm’s satiny texture and the sensation of muscle under its flowing, curving surfaces.
Both men heard the screen door open and the scuff of slippered feet.
“Good morning!” Stella called out.
The two men grimaced owlishly at each other.  John began the slow, torturous walk to the porch, cradling the arm like it was a living baby instead of a thing carved from stone.  Cedric dropped the toilet paper in a trash barrel, and trudged behind.
Stella’s smile faded and her eyes widened in alarm.  She seemed to half-fall down the steps (it is difficult to truthfully depict someone her size as flying), ignoring the men as she rushed past them in her distress.  It was worse than either Cedric or John had imagined.  Stella stood before the maimed statue and began shrieking as if it was Angel himself who’d lost an arm.
Cedric rushed to her side and grasped her by the shoulder.
“It’s a statue, it’s not a real person, Sister Stella,” he consoled her.  He guided her to the steps and helped keep her from collapsing onto them in a heap.  A grief-stricken wail went up from her, like you might have heard back in ancient times, when professional mourners were hired to demonstrate how beloved the departed was to friends and neighbors--except her grief was obviously real.
“No. No, it can’t be,” she blubbered.  “God wouldn’t do that--”
John carefully laid the severed arm on the ground and stuck his hand in his back pocket.  Out came a rumpled handkerchief and back it went with a frown of disappointment.  Cedric pulled out his own neatly ironed, monogrammed handkerchief, and sat down beside Stella.  He began to dry her tears as if comforting a small child in need of its mother.  Which lasted for perhaps two or three seconds, or until she could push him away and snatch the handkerchief from his hand.  In the next moment she sneezed and vigorously blew her nose into the clean, white linen.
“I’m sorry!” She said, suddenly realizing what she had done.  Looking awkwardly aside, she dabbed her eyes on the embroidered black C.  “I’ll launder it for you.”
Silent and unconcerned about the handkerchief, he patted her arm.
“Some awful racket woke me up around three this morning,” she said.  “The street light at the church was out for some strange reason, so I turned the porch light on for a look but couldn’t see anything.  Except--everything looked white, almost like it had been snowing or something.”
“Toilet paper,” John muttered.
A look of consternation crossed her face.  “No, no thank you, Reverend Johnny,” she said, misunderstanding him.  “I have Reverend Champion’s--”
“I meant there were vandals here last night,” he said, barely restraining a grin.  “They TP’d your place--and worse, obviously.  I bet they broke out the street light, too.”
She sobbed anew into the handkerchief.  “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, I guess.”
“Everything will be all right,” John said helpfully.  “Maybe your son can repair the arm.”
“You don’t understand,” she said, with a pitying look for Cedric.  “We just sold it a few days ago.”
John nodded significantly to Cedric.  Everything was much clearer now.  For a moment, the white minister came dangerously close to reassuring his parishioner that it was all for the good, that the Lord probably hadn’t wanted her to fall into temptation because of the money.  Luckily, he let the spasm pass.
She drew a ragged breath and exhaled slowly to steady herself.
“I wouldn’t let Ioletta or Hermione tell you--we wanted it to be a surprise, Brother Champion,” she said mournfully.  “I was checking on the taxes, and then the money was all to go to you to help rebuild your church.”
“That’s all right, Sister--” he automatically began, meaning to finish the sentence by mumbling a few consoling words.  That was before her words quite registered on his brain.  For the second time in a few minutes, he felt as though doused by cold water.  His mouth dropped open.
“Wha--why that--!” He spluttered in outrage.  His hands flew up, balling into fists.  “That dirty devil!”
Neither John nor Stella knew if he was referring to the human culprit who’d done the damage last night, or if he meant the devil himself.  Suddenly, like an errant rocket, Cedric shot to his feet and rushed around the property, attacking stray cups, weeds, and leaves with his rake as if they might conceal the devil or maybe even the trapdoor to hell.  Outside of his prayer closet or his preaching under the unction, no one had ever seen him more animated.  If he could just get at the devil, put his hands around his foul neck--
“How much was it, Sister Stella?” He asked, charging the steps.  “How much money?”
“We sold the statue for $7,000,” she answered.
“Seven thousand!” He exploded.  Again he rushed about, repeating his performance, raking like crazy.  “Seven thousand dollars!”
“Brother Champion,” Rev. Willimon called.
“He’s messin’ in my business!” Cedric roared angrily, tossing the rake like it was a spear.  “Devil, you better not be doin’ that again!”
“Brother Champion!” Willimon repeated.
Out in the street, a limousine had pulled up.  It idled, as brooding and baleful as a beastly, black beetle, at the curb.  Were its occupants perhaps cowed by Cedric’s warlike gestures?  Cedric recovered his rake and joined Stella and John by the steps.  The three of them watched as the chauffeur, dressed totally in black, as before, emerged first, and opened the rear doors.  The man who’d bought Angel’s statue stepped out.  Assisted by the chauffeur, a Japanese woman dressed in an elegantly long black coat stepped onto the sidewalk.
The chauffeur opened the gate for them, and the man and woman walked regally up the pathway, hesitating only at sight of the disfigured statue of Mason Champion.  When they reached the porch steps, they halted.  The man murmured something in Japanese.  The woman’s features, as perfect as that of any porcelain doll, turned shockingly pale.
Stella forced herself to stand.  Cedric leaned on his rake.  John picked up and cradled the disembodied arm.
“I am Mr. Takesugi’s translator,” the woman said with barely a trace of accent.  “Is the artist, Mr. McIlhenny, available, or his agent--the man with the policeman’s badge?”
Stella wiped her eyes and said nothing.  Cedric and John stared mutely.  Takesugi spoke to the woman.
“Mr. Takesugi holds Mr. Odoms, the agent, responsible.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” Cedric said.
She translated.  Takesugi eyed Cedric with interest.  He seemed particularly intrigued by his rake.  He spoke to the woman.
“Then you are the one responsible?” She asked.
“Responsible?  I’m responsible for a good many things,” he said.  “What I meant is that I expect Captain Odoms--the agent, as you called him--was doing a favor for Angel.  Angel’s not in the habit of selling his work.  Believe me, there’ve been people interested before, but he’s never been interested in selling.”
What he didn’t say was that until now, Angel had always been more likely to give away his work than to sell it.  Truth to tell, while he’d never parted with one of his stone sculptures, nearly everyone in the neighborhood possessed one or two of his angels rendered in wood.  As Cedric saw it, if there was someone willing to pay, there was no reason to offer more information than necessary.
“Who is this Angel?” The woman asked.
“Michael McIlhenny and Angel are the same,” Rev. Willimon explained.  “It’s his nickname.”
“I’ll write out the check for Mr. Takesugi,” Stella said.  She looked suddenly startled, as Cedric crooked an arm through her elbow.
“Ask your employer if he would be interested in any of the other statues,” Cedric ordered the woman.  Takesugi shook his head and began speaking to his translator before Cedric could finish.
“Besides his duties as president of the North American branch of his corporation, Mr. Takesugi is an expert in just this sort of artwork,” she explained.  “He says the broken one was the best of the lot.”
Crestfallen, Cedric released Stella.  She started up the steps.  Mr. Takesugi said something else to his translator.
“He still wishes to know who is responsible?” She said.
“It will be a police matter,” John answered.  “It could be they’ll be able to come up with fingerprints.  Who knows?  It still won’t fix things.”
Takesugi nodded his head.  As he stared again at the once perfectly formed arm, his face darkened.  He barked angrily a few words in Japanese (that’s how it sounded to Cedric and John), something that went untranslated by the woman, whose spine nonetheless stiffened.  With a bow first to Cedric and then to John, he turned and left.
Instinctively, Cedric had bowed in return.  John seemed too stunned to respond.
“We will wait in the limousine for the check,” the woman said.  She bowed, as well, and followed Mr. Takesugi.
John sat on the steps.  “I’m sorry, brother.  Really sorry.”
Greatly subdued, Cedric returned to his raking.  John left the arm behind, and dragged a trash barrel closer for Cedric’s use.  Stella came down the stairs and walked to the limousine.  Cedric didn’t look up from his work until Stella disappeared back inside her house and the limousine had driven away.  His lips were compressed in a thin line.  Neither he nor John said a word.
A minute or two later, Stella called to the men to come to the kitchen for coffee.
Angel was polishing off the last of an omelet.  John set the arm on the table beside Angel, who bent over it and stared for a moment and then reached out and patted it affectionately.
“I wish I could take it like that,” Cedric muttered.
Stella set out two cups of coffee, and wiped at a tear with the back of her hand.  “In a few days, Brother Champion, I’m sure we all will,” she said.  “Want sugar and cream?”
Both men shook their heads.
“Right now it feels like the church burned down all over again,” Cedric muttered.
“I guess the Lord has more to teach us,” Stella said, pulling out a chair for herself.  She reached for cream and sugar.  No one said anything, as Stella stirred her coffee.  John made a few noises, without any resulting words.
“What will you do with that arm, Brother Angel?” Cedric asked.
Angel picked up the arm and closely ran his good eye over it.  The jagged end needed smoothing.  He rotated one palm over it, Cedric wondering if it was in anticipation of grinding and rounding the imperfections, until the arm, by itself, should be transformed into a completed work of art on its own?  Elbows on the table, he hefted the arm as if it was as light as balsa wood, the muscles rippling across his forearms and into his biceps.  They weren’t smooth, handsomely bulging bodybuilder’s arms, but ropy, strong, and stony to the touch.  His grip, too, as anyone who ever shook hands with him knew, was like iron.
He began humming a tune easily recognized by the others--Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.
John grinned first.  Cedric couldn’t resist smiling, either.
“Brother Angel really does live in a different world, doesn’t he?” John remarked.
Cedric nodded soberly.  “Takes the pride right out of you, doesn’t it?”  Out of me, he meant.
“Have you men had breakfast?” Stella asked.  “I can whip up something for you, if you want.”
Both men begged off, and concentrated on their coffee.  There was work to be done, and while Cedric seldom ate breakfast, John had grabbed a bite of scrambled eggs before rushing from the house that morning.
Someone knocked at the front door.  John gestured for Stella to stay put.  “Probably Kenny,” he said, meaning Flowers Baptist’s newest part-time youth minister.  No need to mention the boy, a young college student, was late as usual.
At the door Kenny greeted him with his most apologetic smile.
“There’s somebody who wants to talk with Sister Stella or the gardener,” he said almost breathlessly.  He turned and pointed to the street.  “In that limo.  You know who they mean by the honorable gardener, Reverend Johnny?”
John ran to the kitchen.  “They’re back!” He shouted.
Cedric nearly choked.  Stella sloshed coffee across the front of her blouse.  Angel’s humming went unabated as he turned the arm over and over in his hands, perhaps finishing the work with the lathe of his imagination.  As John and Cedric came down the steps together, leaving Kenny behind, they saw Takesugi and his assistant enter at the gate.
“What do you think they want?” Cedric asked.
“I hope they’re not stuck on that business of who’s responsible,” John whispered.
Stella’s check fluttered in the woman’s hand like it was a hanky.  “Mr. Takesugi has changed his mind!” She cried out.  Takesugi’s eyes narrowed in disapproval, which was not lost upon his assistant.  Seeing her mien appropriately transformed, he beamed sternly at the world.
Takesugi bowed to both men, who bowed in return, now with smiles.
“He has decided he wants the statue,” she told them.  “As long as the Angel Michael can do something about the other arm.”
John turned with a wink for Cedric.  “I’ll let Angel and Sister Stella know!” He said, before eagerly running up the steps past the waiting Kenny.
Cedric smiled.  Amusement flickered at the corners of the woman’s mouth.  Had she purposely called Stella’s son the Angel Michael?
“There is also another favor Mr. Takesugi would like to ask.”
“If I can help at all, Miss,” he said, with a courteous bow.
“The first statue was for himself.”
“Yes?”
“He is in the market for two more.  Can you tell him anything about these others?  It is important to know the story behind each of them.”
Easy enough, Cedric thought, struggling to keep his heart from leaping out of his chest.  He knew every person the statues had been modeled after.  The truth was, providing Takesugi with a few biographical sketches would be much easier than keeping himself from shouting hallelujah! and dancing wildly around the yard.



****



Chapter 38

Like sands in the hourglass of time, the days of November drained away and gave place to December--to January--to February--and finally to March.  Beam by beam and board by board, rain or shine, Alliance Baptist grew upon its new foundation, guided by Haggai’s 2,500-year-old prophecy:  The glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former, saith the Lord of hosts: and in this place will I give peace, saith the Lord of hosts.
Cedric repeated the last phrase with varying emphasis, as he paced the length and breadth of the sanctuary, his voice echoing from bare walls and bare floors, sounding hollow yet nonetheless somehow reassuring: “And in this place will I give peace, saith the Lord of hosts... and in this place will I give peace, saith the Lord of hosts... and in this place will I give peace, saith the Lord of hosts... and in this place will I give peace, saith the Lord of hosts...”
People didn’t call Alliance Baptist Reverend Champion’s church without reason; he had taken a handful of people over forty years ago and expanded what was at that time a little chapel into one of the city’s largest churches, black or white.  While other preachers had come and gone in Calneh, some simply moving onto greener pastures, some losing vision or focus, some slipping back into the old life, he had continued to nurture the spiritual life of a community and to grow as a result, both personally and in ministry.  While delays came over the years and setbacks here and there (like the burning of his church), all frustrating and certainly trying, none had discouraged him for long or put him down for the count.  Yes, he had built his faith upon a strong foundation and had seen his trust in God answered too many times to believe that God could fail him now.
So what if the devil stole $7,000 from him one day back in October?  Hadn’t God doubled the money back to him on the same day?  Fourteen thousand dollars paid for an awful lot of lumber, and when the newspapers found out about the crippled white boy’s generous gift, money had come pouring in from people all over Calneh to buy enough lumber to finish the work.
That was why he wasn’t worried now.  Merely because donations had petered out and there weren’t the funds to keep the carpenters going was no reason to panic or to cry, “Woe is me.”  God would come through.  Yes, he knew it--God would come through.  Maybe not right away, maybe not this very minute, but He would come through.
Maybe you shouldn’t have decided on a building plan greater than the former?  Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to expand, to add a balcony with all its attendant costs?  Maybe you should have been thinking about retirement instead of forging ahead with a mind toward ambitious growth?  You are nearly 70.  Who do you think you are--Moses?
Why not? he answered the niggling doubts.  Moses was 80 years old when God confronted him on the back side of the desert.  Joshua and Caleb were about the same when they led the Israelites into the Promised Land.  Seventy was young!
He proclaimed the words again, speaking them louder than before: “The glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former, saith the Lord of hosts: and in this place will I give peace, saith the Lord of hosts.”
Bare of carpet, bare of acoustical tile, without pews and without people, the building seemed almost like some barren, lonely canyon, if he should lose focus on the words of Haggai.  The place was cold, too.  A chill went down his spine.
Doesn’t matter, he told himself, fighting back.  It’s just a feeling.
A window rattled at the rumbling of his voice, as he repeated the verse.  “Better get used to it, windows,” he said.  “The glory of this house will be greater than the glory of the former.”
He went out through the front doors and double checked to make sure they were locked.  Consulting his watch, he decided he could afford to sit for a few minutes on the landing, to watch the traffic and to wave at people passing by in their automobiles.  The honking of horns in return and people waving their hands in encouragement from open windows were like a tonic to his soul.  The memory of building the first Alliance Baptist came flooding back, of sitting on the original, smaller landing to wave at passing traffic.  The cars might be newer--most of them--but the feeling was the same.  Joy. Of good things about to happen.  Of God establishing something now that they had a real building instead of a tiny chapel.
His black Cadillac sat at the curb.  Out of the corner of his left eye, he saw a yellow Checker cab coming down the street.  It slowed to a crawl as it approached Sister Ioletta’s house.  When it reached the church, its driver parked behind his Caddy.  The rear window rolled down.
“Reverend!”
He stood and walked down the steps.  He saw the green Army uniform first, the mahogany-colored, smiling face under the matching dress cap second.
“Lamarr, son!” He exclaimed.
“I’ll get out here,” Lamarr told the driver, a white man wearing blue polyester slacks and a navy blue jacket.  Both men came out of the cab, the driver going to the trunk, while Lamarr reached out to greet Cedric with a handshake.
“None of that, son,” Cedric said, brushing the hand aside to give him a bear hug.  He stood back and eyed Lamarr’s uniform.  “Look at you, you’re a captain now?”
“At your service, sir,” he said, with a smart salute.
“And the medals and ribbons?  What are those for?  How did you earn a bronze star?”
“Well,” he said, his eyes crinkling.  “Now I can’t tell you that, can I?  You’d tell my mother, and I’d never hear the end of it.”
They laughed.  The cab driver closed the trunk and set Lamarr’s cases on the sidewalk, laying his suit bag over them.  As Lamarr took out his wallet, the man held up his hand in a gesture of refusal.
“Remember, I told you I was in Korea myself,” he said, grinning.  “Besides, I know your mother, and your money’s no good with me.”
“You sure?” Lamarr said in surprise.
“I’m sure, brother.”
Lamarr stared, as the driver winked at Cedric and then turned and walked around the front of the cab.  He waved at them as he pulled away from the curb.
“Brother...” Lamarr muttered.  He stared at Cedric.  “Wow, things are different around here.”
“That’s one of Reverend John’s people,” Cedric told him.
“Like I said, things are different around here...”  He looked up suddenly, his voice trailing off as he appraised the church.  “Give me the nickel tour?”
Cedric checked his watch and clicked his tongue in regret.  “I have a counseling appointment at Flowers Baptist in about sixty seconds.”  Seeing Lamarr’s disappointed expression, he said, “Oh, I guess I can be late for once in my life.  How about if I let you in and you just make sure you close the door behind you when you leave?”
“That’ll work,” Lamarr said, grabbing his suitcases and vaulting several steps at a time.
“Whoa, you move too fast for an old man like me, son,” Cedric said, climbing the steps one by one.
Lamarr smiled innocently.  “So what was Moses really like, sir?”
Cedric laughed, and opened the door.  Outside the sky was cloudless and bright, and at one o’clock with natural daylight pouring in through the windows, plugging in the temporary work lights was unnecessary.  The walls of the foyer were framed in but unfinished, allowing an unobstructed view of the interior.
Lamarr set his cases by the door, removed his cap, and walked down the center of the sanctuary.  “It’s bigger,” he commented.
Cedric nodded.  “You can look around for yourself, check out the balcony.”
Lamarr eyed lumber and particle board and drywall stacked across the full width of the stage.  Rolls of tar paper stood like sentinels against the far wall.  “Where is everyone, sir--lunch should be over, shouldn’t it?”
“You can hear all about it tonight, if you feel up to it.  I guess you know we meet Thursday nights at Flowers, don’t you?”
Lamarr nodded.  His mother wrote to him every week, whether he answered her letters or not.
Cedric moved toward the door.  “You’ll remember to close up?”
“Yessir.”
Cedric went out, and the door clicked shut behind him.  Lamarr took a deep breath, savoring the smell of freshly sawn lumber.  It was good to be home.  Things sure were different on Flowers, though, if the cab driver was any indicator.  The man’s gesture almost made up for the curses he’d been greeted with at SFO during one of his layovers from Korea, compliments of two long-haired white girls in buckskin jackets, flashing their peace signs and shrilly chanting, “Baby killer!  Baby killer!  Baby killer!”  The usual names he’d heard over the years from racists were less jarring.
#
To save time, Cedric drove his Cadillac to Flowers Baptist for his appointment.  True to form for the average person who receives free counseling, the woman was late, which in reality meant that in spite of his own tardiness he reached his office with five minutes to spare.  After answering a spate of phone calls, discussing the Sunday bulletin with Ruby, and holding another hour-long counseling session, he left his office at 5:15 to grab a light supper at home.  By 6:45 he was back at Flowers Baptist with Theodora at his side for the Thursday night Bible study and prayer meeting.
When Ioletta came in and sat near the Wurlitzer organ as usual, Cedric went to greet her.
“I saw Lamarr,” he told her.  “Is he coming tonight, sister?”
She rolled her eyes in exasperation.  “You probably saw him more than I did.  He stormed in with all his stuff and barely gave me a chance to look at him.  It was like somebody lit a fire under him--he couldn’t get out fast enough.”
He flashed her a commiserating look and turned quickly away, unable to restrain a grin.
It was 8:45 before he and Theodora left church.  As usual, he drove from the parking lot onto Flowers Avenue and headed toward Alliance.  He slowed the Caddy as they approached Ioletta’s house.
“Cedric!” Theodora cried, first to see the light shining from Alliance’s windows.
He brought the car to a lurching halt in front of the church and swung open the car door.
“Cedric, call the police!”
Sliding from behind the steering wheel, he shook his head and slammed the door.  Like Lamarr earlier in the day, he found himself vaulting the steps.  Theodora powered down her window.  “You could ask Captain Odoms for help!”
He shook his head in another no.  Sometimes there’s no time to run for help or to wait for it.  He inserted his key and cautiously pulled open the door.  With his heart pounding in his throat, he slipped inside and eased the door shut, and found himself blinking in astonishment.  He had expected to see through open framing into the sanctuary; instead, the foyer was covered in drywall.  On the floor, particle board had been nailed down over the tongue-and-groove sub-flooring.  Suddenly, he realized the hammering that echoed through the building wasn’t his heart.
Over the din, he heard someone tap lightly at the door.  Knowing it would be Theodora, he pushed the door open and let her in.  With a finger raised to his lips in warning, he took her by one arm and pulled her toward the nearest archway into the sanctuary.  The hammers had fallen silent.  Muffled by drywall, voices conferred, one easily identifiable as Lamarr’s.  Chance Odoms’ unmistakable, raspy voice answered.  There was a grunt from yet a third man somewhere else in the sanctuary.  A circular saw screamed to life.  Above the noise of the saw, hammering recommenced.
Cedric and Theodora looked cautiously in.  Work lights flooded the sanctuary, revealing large sections of the floor covered in tar paper.  Lamarr and Chance were on their knees, hammering down particleboard close to the stage.  Roberts Robertson laid down his circular saw, and Lee Jackson Davis helped him to position a freshly cut piece of particleboard over a section of tarpaper.
Back out in the car, Theodora stared askance at Cedric, who couldn’t seem to stop from chortling over what they had seen.  Finally, she punched his arm, which spurred him to further laughter.
“Now you tell me,” Theodora began, “why those--those boys would want to help us!”
Cedric knew she had wanted to say crackers and not boys.  He went on laughing, now at Theodora’s bewilderment, as they drove away from the church.
“Do they think God’s going to reward them?” Theodora demanded.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said, momentarily sobering.  “God will sort it out one way or another.”
He suspected the only reason Roberts Robertson and the bantam Lee Jackson Davis would want to help was because they wanted to get his black congregation out of Flowers Baptist once for all.  But he didn’t care about their motives.  In fact, he hoped God would bless them--regardless of their motives, the church was being rebuilt.



****



Chapter 39

For two reasons, Ioletta didn’t often pay close attention to Angel’s statues, the first being that she felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of them.  In fact, it was the same as when she’d once walked into a big city museum and come down with a splitting headache because of too many paintings, too many sculptures, too many geniuses in the world.  Stella’s front yard was just like that for her.
If she didn’t pay much attention to Angel’s individual statues because of the headache angle, though, simply walking past them sufficed, rather, to somehow elevate her, to give her a warm and fuzzy feeling.  And besides that, if she should admit it to herself, at the same time she felt just a bit of pride over Angel.  How many people in the world could claim to know a blind cripple boy who knocked out statues as pretty as any of those dead, fancy-pants Italians from past centuries?
The second reason for her not paying particularly close attention to Angel’s statues might seem like plain old narcissism; the truth was that none of them was of her, which meant that looking at them was a bit like looking at family photographs and not finding her own face among them.  Surrounded by statues bearing the likenesses of many of her neighbors and not finding one of herself was disappointing.  Undoubtedly, most people would feel the same.
She consoled herself with the fact that Angel had yet to produce a likeness of his mother in stone, either.  Stella Jo claimed it was infinitely more difficult to capture those he loved and respected the most than it was their everyday neighbors or people from the church.  Ioletta viewed things more pragmatically; he simply did not possess a stone sufficiently large to reproduce a life-sized likeness of either one of them.  Which was just as well; when it came down to it, she didn’t relish the idea of seeing the chunk of stone it would require.  Just because she was over 400 pounds didn’t mean she either saw herself or wanted herself immortalized that way.
In her own mind, at least in the occasional daydream, she was still the young, thin girl who hid herself among the trees, spying on her papa as he went about the work of cooking up a batch of country medicine.  Back then, long before he committed his crimes against her, she had been light enough to walk on dry twigs without breaking them.  That memory was perhaps what drew Ioletta to an elegantly thin statue she’d noticed Angel working on for the past couple of months.  Its delicate shoulders and more delicate suggestion of wings, though she wouldn’t have thought of it in such terms, lent a pixie-ish quality to the work.  The close-cropped, kinky hair (besides the dark sheen of the stone) told her the subject was one of their black neighbors.
As Ioletta came around its front side, her eyes were drawn first to the thin, tapering sword and small, round shield held against its body.  Her gaze traveled upward, over its shoulders and the slender throat, and into the face, where the lips parted to reveal the teeth.  A statue-like stillness overtook Ioletta.  Minutes passed.  Grass rustled under someone’s feet, and she waved absent-mindedly, acknowledging Lamarr’s arrival without seeing him.  There was something oddly familiar about the statue, familiar and at the same time disturbing.
Lamarr stood at her shoulder, silent for the moment, as he stared at Angel’s work.  He let out a low, admiring whistle.
“It sure is beautiful, isn’t it, Momma?  I think it’s his best work yet, especially the way he’s polished the skin to a high gloss.  See how he’s textured the clothing?”
He whistled admiringly again.  “Did you know he was thinking of doing it?”
She answered facetiously.  “How else, honey?  You know he don’t make no move without my permission.”
He tilted his head forward, squinting first at her and then at the statue’s face.  “You don’t see it, do you?  It doesn’t remind you of some photographs you used to show me?”
“You sayin’ I need glasses or somepin’, boy?”
“It’s you,” he said, looking closer.  “Can’t you see?  Militant, with the gladiator’s sword and shield, but it’s you.”
She didn’t answer, hadn’t seemed to hear him.  The set of its shoulders, along with the weapons, suggested fierce determination.  Not nearly so fierce was the gap-toothed smile of the thin girl, reminiscent of someone she knew.  But just who had yet to fully sink in.
A tear trickled suddenly down Ioletta’s cheek.  Lamarr took her by the hand.  “Why--why I don’t believe it!” She exclaimed.
“Is that me, Lamarr?” She asked, still entranced by the delicate face.  “Do you think it can be?”
He smiled at her, enjoying the moment.  She put her hand to her mouth and giggled with pleasure.  Soon, her whole body shook with laughter.
“Why, that boy!” She said, her bosom swelling with love for Angel.  Admiring the statue, she felt overcome by awe, both by God and the gifting He had placed upon Angel.  How could she feel otherwise?  The boy was close to stone blind, and yet, in the statues all around her, he had been able to reproduce the likenesses of people she saw most every day in the neighborhood--and of herself in her nearly forgotten youth.  If that wasn’t a miracle, then like the song said, “God didn’t make little green apples.”  That was for sure.
“You all comin’ in?” Stella called from the porch.  “Ioletta?  Lamarr?”
Neither Ioletta nor Lamarr answered, staring a few moments longer at Angel’s handiwork.  Stella waited patiently, understanding the joy of recognition felt by her friends.
Mother and son tore themselves away.  Lamarr helped her up the steps.
Stella stood aside for Ioletta to enter the house, while Lamarr hastened to brush sawdust from his jeans.  “Lamarr,” she said, giving him a joyous hug.  “The Lord bless you Lamarr, but it is wonderful to see you.”
“Can you believe that son of yours?” Ioletta interrupted.  “He done knocked out a statue of me.  If it ain’t the most beautiful thing!”
Stella arched a questioning eyebrow at her.
“Y-you sayin’ you don’t believe me?” Ioletta demanded.
“A statue of you?” She asked, with a wink for Lamarr, as Ioletta rolled her eyes in exasperation.
“Yes.  A statue of me.”  She pulled Stella back out to the porch and pointed to the monument of herself.  “That’s it, right there.”
“That skinny little thing?” Stella asked with mock exaggeration.  “That’s the little gap-toothed girl--what’s her name?  Chrissy Dawkins from down the street.”
Ioletta’s jaw dropped.  “There ain’t no gap in her teeth!” She huffed indignantly.
“No?  Well, then I guess it must be her sister.”
“I think she must be right, Momma,” Lamarr said.
Her eyes raced between the two of them.  “Her sister?  She have a sister?”
Neither Stella nor Lamarr could hold back any longer.  Stella tittered gleefully, and Lamarr joined in with guffaws.  Shaking their heads, they re-entered the house and headed for the kitchen.
“You devils!” Ioletta exclaimed.  “My own son!”
Laughing, she remained on the porch, stealing time to gaze awhile longer at the statue before following them into the house.
“What you eatin’?” She asked, her hunger stimulated by her joy, as she walked into the kitchen.
Angel, his clothes dusted with dirt and stone chips as usual, sat at the table, a white bread sandwich in one hand and glass of milk in the other.  Stella poured iced tea for Lamarr, who stood at the counter, waging war on a sandwich by quarters.
“Goobers and jam,” Lamarr mumbled.
“Angel on that kick again?” Ioletta asked.
Stella shrugged her shoulders.  “Angel likes his peanut butter, always has.  If you want, I could probably rustle up some burned chicken for you from the fridge.”
“Burned chicken, that’s right,” Ioletta said, shaking her head.  She took a seat at the table.  “I’ll have peanut butter like everybody else, if you’re makin’.
“Lamarr, why don’t you sit down like a human being to eat your sandwich?  What do they teach you in that Army of yours?  I thought you was an officer and officers was supposed to be gentlemen--I’ll have a glass of that iced tea, while you’re up and all.”
Lamarr brought the tea and sat at the table to eat, Stella joining them.  Ioletta’s gaze kept settling on Angel, as she ate her sandwiches (Stella made her two) and drank from a tall glass.  Watching her, Stella and Lamarr exchanged glances, smiling at her predicament.
“I always wondered what I would say,” Ioletta said at last, giving up.  “What do people tell Angel, when he’s made one of his statues of them?”
“Some people say thanks.  Some people don’t say anything at all,” Stella said, smiling.  “Some people think Angel’s deaf, so they don’t even try.”
Ioletta nervously scratched the back of her neck.  “It’s kinda embarrassin’, when it comes right down to it.”
Lamarr pointedly cleared his throat.  “I’d say it must be more embarrassing for Angel, when people talk about him as if he’s not even there.”
“Who--?”  Ioletta paused from chewing her sandwich, and frowned.  “Well, it’s not like he ever--I mean like you ever say anything, Angel.  If you did, I’m sure people would talk mo’ to ya, to yo face, I mean.”
True to form, Angel continued eating as if he had not heard her comment.  Gratefully he wasn’t humming, which at the moment would have annoyed and distracted her.
“I do want to thank you for doing one of your statues of me, though,” Ioletta said.  “It--it do bless me.  I don’t know why, I cain’t explain it, Angel, but it surely do.”
“I think that was nice of your Momma, wasn’t it Lamarr?” Stella remarked, winking at him.
“Very nice,” he said, after a last bite of sandwich.  “Very nice, Momma.”
She smiled in appreciation.  Angel’s reply, if it could be called that, was to smile ever so slightly and stare at nothing in particular.
“He understands,” Stella said.  She brushed crumbs from her hands onto her napkin.  “Another sandwich, anyone?”
“No, two’s enough for me, thank you,” Lamarr replied.
Ioletta eyed her son bitterly.
“Whaa-aat?” He cried.  “I need to get back to the church--somebody has to do the work.”
“Ioletta?” Stella asked.
She sighed in disappointment.  “No, I guess I don’t need nothin’ more.”
“There’s fruit,” Stella suggested helpfully.  “Peaches?  Apples?”
“You know I’m not fond of that stuff, Stella Jo,” she answered.  Mumbling, she said, “Don’t know why God ever made it, exceptin’ it’s nice for putting into preserves once in a while to fill a sweet roll or for makin’ pies.”
Stella and Lamarr played with their empty glasses, content to know she would eventually find her way.  It was Ioletta’s stock answer, whenever anyone offered her fruit, whether fresh or canned.
“Course, maybe I should start on one of those diets.”
The two of them exchanged wide-eyed glances.  Ioletta never talked about dieting.
“Look more like my statue Angel done of me,” she said, nodding her head.  “Be nice to have people remember me that way.”
“Are you dying, Momma?  Something you haven’t told me?” Lamarr asked seriously.
“Dyin’!  Nobody said nothin’ about dyin’.”
Lamarr glanced at Stella and sloshed tea from the jar into his glass.  “Well, for a second there it kinda sounded like it.  It’d sure take dying to get that skinny.”  More quietly, he said, “Hate to have you die on me after I’ve just been promoted to Captain.”
“I’m not dyin’!” She insisted.  “Would you stop about the dyin’?  Can’t a body say a word about--”
She stopped in mid-sentence, staring first at him and then at Stella, and then back at her son.  “Did you say they done promoted you, or are you just pullin’ your poor old momma’s leg?”
“He did say.  And I think this is a fine way of celebrating,” Stella commented, holding up her glass for a re-fill.  He poured, saying nothing, only grinning.  She raised the tumbler in a mock toast and took a sip.
“That’s just like your Lamarr, now isn’t it Ioletta?” She remarked.  “Springing surprises on a person and all.”
Lamarr went on grinning, enjoying the moment.
“Hardly seems decent,” Ioletta said, acting exasperated.  “Something like that shoulda been done up proper, not casual like, least not over peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”
“So you were promoted, Lamarr?” Stella asked.
He nodded, his expression of pleasure unchanged, and took another drink from his glass.
“Those good ol’ boys done promoted my son,” Ioletta said, shaking her head in astonishment.  “Can you beat that?”
“Things are changing,” he said.  “I’m betting they’ll make a few of us into Generals, one of these days.”
“And one of them will be you, Lamarr,” Stella put in.  “I believe that with all my heart.
“We’ve been praying all these years for the Lord’s favor to be upon him, haven’t we, Ioletta?”
“Oh hush!  A General?” She blurted.  “Never happen, not in a million years.”  Ioletta set her glass down hard.  “Does this mean they’ll be sending you back to Vietnam?”
He was silent for a long moment.  “Could be,” he admitted.
“Could be?  You volunteer for duty over there again just so they can shoot you?”
“I said could be,” he tried to explain.  “Besides, the 716th needs me, especially now that the war is supposed to be winding down.”
“Windin’ down,” she said, exasperated.  “What good is being Captain when you’re dead?”
“You think maybe I should say no to MACV, when they asked for me by name?” His voice rose in protest.  “That maybe I shoulda turned down a promotion, when they loved me in Korea?”
He scraped his chair back from the table.  “Dis po’ black boy from Flowers?” He muttered in sarcasm.  “Not me.”  Scowling, he rose and placed his empty glass in the white porcelain sink.  He had eaten his sandwiches off of a napkin, which he now wadded up and threw into the trash under the counter.
“I wish you wouldn’t leave so soon, Lamarr,” Stella said.  “Your momma didn’t mean it, and it’s so nice all of us sitting here like old times.”
“Oh, she meant it,” he replied.  His mother’s stubbornly set jaw told the whole story.  “But it doesn’t matter if she wants to treat me like a little boy--I can stay out of her hair the whole month.  There’s plenty of carpentering to do at the church.”
She felt like kicking Ioletta’s shins under the table.  Not only was Ioletta’s jaw set, she refused to look in either Stella’s or Lamarr’s direction.
“You’ll come for dinner after church tomorrow, won’t you?” Stella asked.
He went to her and kissed her on the cheek.  “I have to make it to Momma Stella’s for Sunday dinner, don’t I?”
“If you don’t, I’ll never speak to you again.”
He laughed, reaching out and touching Angel on the shoulder in farewell, but Angel was reaching for his crutches.  The two of them left together, Lamarr glancing at his mother and giving Stella a wink, as he courteously let Angel go through the doorway first.
“Ioletta Brown!” Stella exclaimed, when they were gone.  “I can’t believe you.  You are a piece of work, treating your son like that!  Aren’t you proud of him at all?”
“Huh!” She retorted.  “Proud all right, but pride goes before a fall.  What good is pride when you’re dead?  You know how he won his other promotions, don’t you?”  She sniffed loudly.  “Love him at MACV--huh!  He don’t even talk right no mo’.  Sounds more like a white boy--did you notice that?”
Stella sighed deeply, wondering how she could smooth things over between Ioletta and Lamarr.
“Always stickin’ his neck out for somebody!” Ioletta exclaimed with a snort of disapproval.  “Well, somebody has to think for the boy, don’t they?”
“I’m sure it takes brains, Ioletta, not just foolhardiness,” she replied, remembering Lamarr’s heroism in her own behalf.  “I don’t think they would promote him if they didn’t have every confidence in him.  They’re not stupid, you know.”
Grudgingly, Ioletta shook her head and smiled.  “Somebody has to caution the boy.”
Suddenly they heard a knock from the direction of the living room.  The front door opened, and there were footsteps.  Lamarr coming back to apologize like a good son?  Both women looked expectantly toward the hallway.
“Sister Stella?” A woman called out.
Ioletta stiffened visibly, as she recognized the voice.  Stella glanced at Ioletta before answering.
“In the kitchen!” She called in return.  “Come and sit.”
A petite woman with naturally red hair and rust complexion hesitated at the kitchen doorway.
“Sister Brown,” she greeted Ioletta.
Ioletta sipped from her empty glass. “Persimmon,” she answered stiffly.
“Sit, please sit, Cinnamon,” Stella politely said, using the name the woman preferred, as she rose to serve her.  Everyone in the neighborhood knew the story of how her daddy had named her Persimmon, once he caught sight of her dark red hair on the day she was born.  Everyone knew, too, how she hated that name.  A lot of folks, like Ioletta, acted like they didn’t think the name of a spice was any better than the name of a fruit.
Stella fetched a glass from the shelf and poured tea from the dwindling supply in the gallon jar, as the newcomer took a seat at one end of the table.
Ioletta frowned, and Cinnamon looked straight ahead, avoiding her gaze, ignoring the unspoken, What are you doing here?
Stella went to the refrigerator for a fresh lemon to slice.  She plopped ice into the glass, bringing the tea almost to the brim, and slid the lemon round neatly over its rim.  She set the glass in front of her guest, and handed her the sugar bowl and a long spoon.
“Thank you, that’s nice,” Cinnamon replied with obvious gratitude.  She carefully stirred sugar in, and while it still swirled in the glass, took a long drink.
“More?” Stella asked politely.
Cinnamon shook her head, and drained the rest.  The ice clinked in the glass as she set it down.  The other two women exchanged glances.  Moaning and sighing at one and the same time, she glanced furtively at Ioletta, whose frown remained unchanged.
“Did you want to say something privately?” Stella asked, reaching out with one hand and touching her on the arm.  “You know you can speak freely, sister, in front of Sister Ioletta.”
Tears sprang from the red-haired woman’s eyes.  Seeing them, Ioletta roared as if someone had jabbed her in the ribs.  Stella looked after her in alarm as she slid her chair out from the table, its wooden frame splitting loudly from the sudden shift in weight, and rushed from the room.  Moments later, the front door slammed shut, the house quivering as she descended the front steps.
Stella eyed Cinnamon and reassuringly patted her hand.  “You just tell me what you have to tell me, and don’t worry about what anyone but God thinks.”
“I didn’t ask for this burden,” she said, sobbing loudly and taking Stella by the hand.
#
Tears ran freely down Ioletta’s cheeks.  It was not the first time she had shed tears in Stella’s yard, nor would it be the last.  As she stood in front of her own likeness, pretending to admire it when her heart was really back in Stella’s kitchen, she drew strength from Angel’s presence, from his melodic humming and from the sound of chisel on stone.  Like most of what he hummed, she recognized the tune as a hymn.  Near the Cross had always been a comforting song to her, and it was now, too.  How many crosses were there, though, she wondered?  Sometimes it seemed like there was never an end to them, like they stretched from one horizon to the other for all of one’s days.
She wondered if Angel was aware of Cinnamon’s arrival and what he thought about her.  Silly question, though, since he had carved out a wooden bust of her years ago, one of his first, likely as a tribute to her kindness.  When it came right down to it, Cinnamon was a kind girl, even if she didn’t much like her.  And besides, Angel didn’t carve people he didn’t think nice.  Yet, standing now in front of her own statue, it was a comfort to her that she could honestly say Cinnamon’s image wasn’t half so pretty.
There were footsteps on the porch, two people coming down the stairs.  Ioletta wiped the tears from her eyes and dried her face on her sleeve.  Scorning what they might think of her staring at a statue of herself (even if it did resemble a warrior-girl instead of a 400-pound woman), she didn’t turn.  Besides, who was to say she couldn’t look like that again, if she really put her mind to it?
“I didn’t ask for this burden,” Cinnamon announced quietly.
Ioletta fumed, wrestling with her inner grump.  “I know,” she replied, the passing seconds weighing upon her, forcing the words from her lips.  Maybe she wouldn’t turn to face Cinnamon, but she couldn’t be completely rude without catching a burden of guilt over it.
“Angel honey,” Cinnamon said in farewell.
From the corner of one eye, Ioletta saw Angel pause in his work to wave goodbye.  He grinned, ceasing his humming, and when the fading footsteps signaled Cinnamon’s departure, his humming resumed on the note where he had left off.
Ioletta heard the sound of hammer and chisel, and waited for Stella to return from the gate.
“I think I broke your chair,” she said contritely.
“It was bound to happen,” Stella replied.
Bound to?  “You should talk!” She exclaimed, hooting with laughter.  “It was bound to happen--!”
Stella grinned.  “I’ve been thinking of buying some good, heavy-duty steel chairs.”
“Don’t think I’m the only one around here needs to go on a diet,” Ioletta retorted.
“As skinny as all that, I shouldn’t guess you have to worry about diets,” Stella said, staring pointedly at Ioletta’s statue.
Sobering quickly, Ioletta glanced sideways at Stella.  “Are you gonna tell me, or not?”
“The way you rushed out, I didn’t think you wanted to know.”
“The woman’s a witch,” Ioletta complained bitterly.
Stella was silent a long moment, before asking, “Just because she told you that you need to forgive your father?”
Ioletta’s eyes grew large.  “She tol’ you about that?”
“No, I just guessed it--figured you didn’t listen to her anymore than you did to me.”  Or to God, she could have added.
It was Ioletta’s turn for silence.  Her face twisted in a series of frowns and scowls, finally settling upon a tight-lipped expression.
“Ioletta dear,” Stella said, again the one to break the silence.  “Some people really do hear from God.  It’s not like you don’t know that.”
“She’s one of those always hearin’ doom, that’s what I don’t like.”
Stella peered at her questioningly.
“Okay, so I don’t like her tellin’ me things I knowed in the first place,” she admitted.
“She could maybe approach people a little differently,” Stella said.
“I should think so.”
“Of course if you’d ever forgiven your father like you were supposed to, God wouldn’t have to tell me or poor Cinnamon to talk to you about it.”
“Huh!” Ioletta retorted, turning away.
“That’s your answer?” Stella asked.
“Let’s clean up that rickety ol’ chair of yours,” she said, tilting her head toward Angel, signaling her desire to speak in private.
In the kitchen, she wouldn’t allow Stella to speak until she had inspected the split chair.  “I’ll ask my Lamarr if he can fix it,” she said doubtfully, acknowledging to herself that maybe there was a limit to how many times a chair could be repaired.
“I didn’t think you and your son were on speaking terms,” Stella remarked.
Ioletta squinted through one eye at the chair.  “Well, just this once.”
“Oh, stop with your nonsense already.”
“Well, you can tell me what Persim--Cinnamon said, but I ain’t sittin’ down to hear it, that’s for sure, not on one of your cheap, flimsy chairs, lady.”
Stella rolled her eyes in amusement.  “What’s to say?”
“See, I tol’ you, I knew it was doom and gloom.”
Stella took a deep breath before answering.  “It didn’t exactly come as a surprise.”
“What?” Ioletta asked, growing impatient.
“She told me I was to put my house in order.”
Ioletta’s jaw dropped.
“I’ve been workin’ at putting my house in order for years,” Stella said.
“Wha--what?  To move, or somethin’?” She asked, knowing full well what it was that she meant.
“I have--well, you know I haven’t been feeling too well these past few months.  Not since before Angel’s accident, really.”
“Yeah?”
The doctor thinks I have--leukemia.  I didn’t want to tell you, not yet.  The doctor just diagnosed it and is waiting for more tests to come back.”
Ioletta leaned against the kitchen counter and took deep, slow breaths, while her friend watched in alarm.
“I-I could die in months or it could be years,” Stella said, speaking reassuringly.  “No one really knows, except the Lord.”
“Oh good,” Ioletta blurted mildly, raising one hand to ward off a comforting pat on the arm.  “For a minute there I thought it was something serious.”
When Stella’s eyebrows arched in surprise, Ioletta said, “I was tryin’ to be funny.  ‘Laughter doeth the heart good medicine.’ ”
“Oh,” Stella said in small voice.  “Ha-ha.  It was funny.”
“See, you’re looking better already,” she answered in a voice equally small.  There was a rueful expression on her face.  “I knew this nice day couldn’t last.”
“Nice day?  I tell you I’m dying, and you’re complaining about it ruining your day?”
“Yeah, I’m selfish,” Ioletta said, careless of what it sounded like.  “I don’t have so many nice days that I like them spoiled by my friends dropping like flies around me.”
Both women were silent for a long moment, silent and uncomfortable in each other’s presence.
“You know,” Ioletta said, breaking the silence, “I could die long before you do.”
“If it makes you feel better,” Stella said, her shoulders slumping.
“It does,” Ioletta answered.  She took a seat and, elbows propped on the table, rested her chin in her hands.
“Penny for your thoughts?” Stella said.
“You won’t like ’em.”
Stella sat down, elbows on the table, too, consciously mirroring her expression.  “Try me.”
“I was just wonderin’ how somebody like Mertie Davies could steal your son away...”
“Yes?” Stella said, turning suddenly pale.
“Before you start preaching ’bout how unchristian I am,” Ioletta said, “you tell me how fair it is for you to die and that woman to go on livin’.”
Looking stricken, Stella held her hand delicately to her throat.  “You take my breath away, Ioletta.  What an awful thing to say!”
Ioletta sat back in her chair, laced her hands over her stomach, and set her jaw firmly.  “Still, I don’t see how it’s right.”
“Well...” Stella said, attempting to marshal her thoughts.  “Isn’t that God’s business and not ours?  I mean, if He wants me to die before her, isn’t that up to Him?  And besides, He forgave her and gave her another chance just like He did you and me, don’t you think?”
Ioletta clicked her tongue in disgust.  “It don’t seem right, not when she don’t even write to you after all we done for her.”
Stella sighed.  “We were praying God would heal her, weren’t we?”
“Still...”
“And you did say she prayed like I told her to, didn’t you?”
“Well... yes.  I guess.”
“Then I think we just have to have faith and patience with her.  We can’t always judge a thing with our eyes, can we?”
“Well, no.”
“And we don’t know when I’ll die, or you, or any of us.  Like I said, it could be years.  The doctor told me himself.  Could be like that Bible story, you know the one.”
Ioletta raised her eyebrows.
“Hezekiah, you know,” Stella said.  “The one where the king was dying and God gave him another fifteen years.”
Ioletta relaxed, dropping her hands to her sides.  “Fifteen years would be all right.”
“You want more iced tea?” Stella asked.  “I’m brewing up some.”
“Yeah, that would be good.  You any of them snicker doodles hidden around here somewheres, too?”
“You think those are right for your new diet?” Stella asked, rising from the table and going to the pantry cupboard for tea bags.
“Diet?  What are you talkin’ about, girl?”
“Never mind, I’ll dig them out of the ice box,” she answered, concealing a grin.
Ioletta rested her elbows on the table and hid a smile of her own behind her hands, content to wait for the tea and cookies.  Fifteen years would be fine.  She would ask for the church to pray, and Stella’s church would pray, too, though those white folks weren’t as good at it, and just like Hezekiah she would live her fifteen years more.  The day wasn’t ending so badly after all.
Knowing Stella Jo wasn’t dying right away, her thoughts returned to Angel’s newest statue.  All in all, it was a pretty good day--even if she wasn’t sure about the matter of Lamarr’s promotion and his going back to Vietnam.
“Stella Jo?”
“Yeah?”
“Maybe I’ll have just one of them cookies of yours.”
“All right,” Stella said, smiling brightly and reaching for a plate.
“And the same for you,” she added.  “Wouldn’t seem right, me thin and you lookin’ like a balloon.”
Stella glanced out of the corner of her eye, as she set the cookie plate on the table.  Ioletta hadn’t so much as grinned! 
“Don’t press your luck,” she warned her.  “You keep on, Ioletta, I’ll only let you have half a cookie.”
“Hmmh.”
“Hmmh what?”
“Well, you know, I did think you been lookin’ awful puny this last year... I could do with half a cookie, but maybe you oughta have two?”



****



Chapter 40

Rev. Champion’s Cadillac was parked in front of the church.  Forgetting the argument with his mother, Lamarr took the church steps in two strides.  Someone had the door propped open with a piece of scrap 2x4.
“Reverend Champion?” He called.
Cedric was in the sanctuary.  To Lamarr’s astonishment, he was dressed in a t-shirt and carpenter’s overalls.  The minister saw his look of surprise and shrugged apologetically.
“Nails are the devil on suit pockets, and a belt loop’s not much good for holding a hammer, now is it?”
“No, I guess not,” Lamarr said.  “I’m still surprised, though.  Have you ever swung a hammer?”
Cedric grinned.  “You wouldn’t ask the Lord that, would you, son?”
Lamarr scratched at the stubble on his chin and dubiously looked Cedric up and down.  “No,” he answered.  “But you’re not the Lord, and as I remember it, He was a bona fide carpenter.”
“All right,” Cedric rumbled threateningly.
“Take some getting used to, I’ll tell you, never seeing you in anything but a suit.”  He pointed his chin at Cedric’s shoes.  “I wouldn’t go climbing any ladders in those, that’s for sure.”
Cedric glanced down at his black wingtips.  “All right,” he said again, his rumble tamed, this time.  “I’ll remember that.”
“You still haven’t told me if you know how to use a hammer, sir.”
“It’s been a while, but I’ve used one in my time.”
“Yeah, but weren’t those wooden pegs you were usin’ on the Ark?”
Cedric winced.  “That would be funny, if I hadn’t heard something like it a hundred times.”
There was a gleam in Lamarr’s eyes.  “I suppose you’ve heard them all... you’re old enough.”
“That’s respect for you,” Cedric muttered, as Lamarr laughed.  “Didn’t anyone else show up today?”
Lamarr found his carpenter’s apron and belted it on.  “There were six of us.  One or two said they wouldn’t be coming back after lunch.”  He checked his watch.  “They have a few minutes.”
“Robertson and Davis?” Cedric asked.  “Captain Odoms?”
“Not today,” Lamarr said, looking sharply at Cedric.  “You knew about them?”
“I stopped by after church Thursday.”
“They knew what they were doing.  I didn’t have to tell them anything--they just did it.”
“Those boys aren’t stupid.”
“That’s true.  Do you want to help me, or do you want to work by yourself?”
“Whichever you like.  You can point me to something and I’ll do it, or if you want I can give you a hand.”
Cedric’s back was to the foyer.  Lamarr faced the open doorway.  Cedric saw his eyes widen.
“Can you gentlemen please tell me where Reverend Champion is?” A woman’s voice asked.
Cedric turned and faced Sharese.  Her baby was snuggled against her left shoulder, and she was dressed in a brown smock, blue jeans, and white sneakers.
“Reverend Champion?” She said in surprise.
“I’ll go ahead with my work,” Lamarr said.
“Did you come for the tour?” Cedric asked.  He noticed Lamarr staring after them as they walked away.  Undoubtedly, Sharese noticed, too.
Fifteen minutes later, Cedric returned without Sharese.  Lamarr and several other men from Alliance were nailing up drywall.  Lamarr motioned for him to join him.
Several minutes passed, with them working steadily, before Cedric said anything.  He found Lamarr’s patience impressive.
“You know that’s Erwin’s ex-wife?”
“Erwin?” He said, failing to place the name.
“You met him in my office once--the two of you weren’t real friendly.”
“Hmmh.  Oh that--was that his real name?  I think my mother wrote me about him.  Reminded me of the neighbor’s rat terrier.  Would like to have kicked him to the moon.”
Cedric let Lamarr’s comment pass.  “She’s doing a real work in his old church.”
Lamarr held a sheet of drywall in place with one knee and pounded in a nail.  He nodded, more nails lined up between his lips, waiting their turn.
“The denomination sent out a replacement, but she’s the glue holding the place together.”
Lamarr grunted, continuing his work, while Cedric made sure the drywall didn’t slip out of position.  Maybe he didn’t have to say anything, there being women all over the world who hold churches together.
“She asked about you.”
Lamarr squinted as he pounded in the next nail.  “And you told her...?”
“About how you’re a war hero,” he answered, a glint in his eye.  “You know, the usual thing.  How you love to save damsels in distress.”
Lamarr shook his head, and pounded in another nail.  He supposed he deserved that.  He paused for a moment.  “You were mistaking me for that old friend of yours.”
Cedric looked at him questioningly.
“You know, Sir Lancelot, back in the days of yore.”
“Your mother’s told me about your smart-aleck remarks for years, son.”
“She can’t get one over on me either, sir.”
The sir, Cedric knew, was Lamarr’s way of blunting any disrespect in his jesting.  Jousting, Cedric thought, was how Lamarr used his humor.
“She did ask about you, though.  She’s looking for someone to give his testimony on Sunday night.”
“Do a little preaching, you mean.”
Cedric nodded.  “Could be.”
“Be a model for the young boys.  Someone to look up to.  Besides the pimps and drug dealers and numbers runners.”
“I’m sure that’s what she has in mind.”
“Someone she can marry.”
“I don’t know about that--after him, she may be soured on the idea.”
“You won’t ever catch me preaching.”
“I don’t suppose so.”
They set another piece of drywall in position.  “You told her?” Lamarr asked, as he put in a nail.
Cedric nodded.  It had always been the same, with Lamarr, when it came to speaking in public.  He wondered how many years it would take before Lamarr realized he had the call upon him.  But then, it was usually the ones with the strongest call who resisted the most.
“Have to keep focused,” Lamarr said.
“What?”
“All I’m doing this month is work on the church.”
Cedric didn’t say anything about maybe giving his testimony could be thought of as building the church.  Not Alliance.  The Church.  A thought suddenly occurred to him.
“Is there someone you’re not telling us about, son?”
Lamarr squinted at him in surprise, and went on nailing, swinging the hammer harder.  When he wanted to, he could work faster than several other men combined.
“Hit the nail on the head, huh?”
“What?”
“Nothing, son.”
“You keep calling me son.  Something you and my mother forgot to tell me, Brother Champion?”
Cedric let out a loud huh!  Next time he helped Lamarr he would make sure he wore the suit, nail holes or not.



****



Part Six

Chapter 41

March 10, 1971
My Dear Son Duane,
As always, I am praying for you--
Duane, lying on his back in the top bunk of his jail cell, crumpled up the letter and tossed it expertly into the waste basket.  The envelope followed, side slipping through the air and falling to the floor halfway across the cell.
“You pickin’ that up, fool?” A voice from the lower bunk demanded.
Duane McIlhenny, or Mark John Davies as he preferred to be called, ignored his cell mate and slipped his thumbnail into another envelope already slit open by the prison censors.  He pulled out the letter.  At the top of the page, Mertie had written Feb. 26, omitting the year.
Dear Marky John,
This is your Mama writing to you--
She thinks I don’t know her handwriting by now? he thought, scowling in annoyance.  She always began her letters in the same stupid way.
I know you don’t know, but this is the hardest thing I ever had to say in my whole life, honey--
With Mertie, life was one emergency after another.  What now? he wondered, as he felt the bunk bed shaking under him.
“Hey, fool,” Jaime called to him.  “I picked your trash off the floor.”
“So what?”
“You owe me, bro,” Jaime said cheerfully.
“Yeah, I owe you a real big thanks,” he replied sarcastically.  “Thanks!  See?  I paid you.  You want more?  Thanks, ya freakin’ spick!  You satisfied?”  His voice trailed off in curses.
“That’s okay, hombre, I’ll just take it out of your hide later on.”
“I’m reading my mail.  You know what reading is, don’t you?”
“Hey, that’s pretty good, comin’ from the gringo who don’t even know his own name.  I almost laughed, ha-ha.”
Mark John cursed Jaime and turned back to Mertie’s letter, his lips soundlessly forming each word.  He’d never been much of a reader, probably because of being jumped from school to school as a child, when school was in the picture at all, and he hated being interrupted.  Any interruption forced him to start over from the beginning, like one of those people who learns a sales spiel by rote and can’t pick up from where he left off.
“Says here your bro, he’s doing okay, Duane, if you believe this newspaper clipping.”
Mark John rolled out of his bunk and landed on his feet.  He jammed his forearm against Jaime’s windpipe.  “I’m tryin’ to read!”
A clamor rose from the adjoining cells, men hollering approval.
Jaime, shorter but much stockier, made quick work of throwing him off.  He sprang from his bunk and pinned him to the cell bars.  Mark John gasped for air, eyes bulging, as Jaime returned the favor of a forearm against the windpipe.
“I don’t think you comprendé, hermano,” he snarled.  “You touch me, I’ll kill ya!”
At last, seeing him start to lose consciousness, he released his grip and let him fall to the floor.  Men hooted in appreciation from their cells and screamed for blood.  A guard approached, and Jaime retreated to his bunk.
The guard stopped, eyed Mark John lying in a heap and glanced at Jaime, his face to the cell wall.
“Looks like you need to pick up your trash, Señor Gutierrez,” he said.
“Si,” Jaime replied.
“Como se dice trash in español?” The guard asked.
There was a smile in Jaime’s reply.  “Basura.”
“So pick up the basura, ya spick.”
“Si, Capitan.”
Grinning, the guard continued his walk, and Jaime arose from his bunk.  He crouched over Mark John, fists threatening.  “Hey gringo, if I have to pick you off the floor--”
Mark John grunted, struggling to his feet and backing away by inches.  As always, there was nowhere to run to in a 6x10 cell, where bunk beds, a desk with seat attached, and a toilet and sink took up most of the room.
Jaime sat down on his bunk and nonchalantly picked up the newspaper clipping.  “Says here they think your bro will be muy famoso one of these days.”
Uncowed by Jaime’s threats, he glared from where he stood, his back to the cell bars.
“You better learn to handle that temper of yours,” Jaime said, dropping his exaggerated accent.  “Unless, maybe you want somebody to kill you?”
“Why you readin’ my mail?” Mark John shot back.
“This your mail?” He asked, holding up the discarded envelope addressed to Duane McIlhenny.  “Your name Duane McIlhenny instead of Mark John Davies like you’re always sayin’?”
He scowled and looked away.
“Every week the same, Duh-wayne.  Mail comes, you throw it away.  Why not throw away the packages this McIlhenny cow is always sending you, let me have ’em?”
“Name’s not Duane,” he muttered.
Jaime waved the newspaper clipping Mark John had ignored when pulling the letter from the envelope.
“There’s half a page here about somebody who looks just like you, except he wears an eye patch and uses crutches--a regular Long John Silver.”
“Don’t know nothin’ about it.”
“’Cause you’re too stupid, Duane,” he taunted.  “You’re stuck in here, fool, and he’s out there, people comin’ from everywhere to look at what he can do with his hands.  Statues all around--says here two of his statues were sold to help build a church, man.”
“Do you think I care, ya dumb Mexican?” Mark John said, swearing at him and climbing back up into the top bunk.
“Madre Mia!”
“What now?” Mark John demanded.
“Says here your hermano is deaf, dumb, and blind.”
“He’s not my hermano.”
“All that and he’s still smarter than you,” Jaime added.  “Pretty funny, when somebody’s circled his picture and written your brother on it.”
“Crazy old broad who says she’s my mother sends me that stuff all the time.”
Jaime laughed scornfully.  “Have it your way, hermano.”
“I’m not your hermano,” Mark John muttered, turning back to his letter.  He would have to start all over again.
Feb. 26
Dear Marky John,
This is your Mama writing to you.  I know you don’t know, but this is the hardest thing I ever had to say in my whole life, honey.  I just hope you will understand and accept what I have to say.  I never thought a person could change--
He frowned at the word change.  He had heard that kind of talk before.  To his mind, it was a code word.  Now what scam was she dreaming up?  He concentrated again on her scrawl.
--but since Jesus healed me of my cancer--
Mark John crumpled the letter into a ball and cocked his arm to throw it into the wastebasket.  Only a sudden cramp restrained him, kept him from releasing the wad even as his arm went forward.  Frustrated, he mashed the crumpled piece of paper flat, and slipped it under his bed sheet.
“Liar,” he muttered.  She was always lying, and lying about dying from cancer wasn’t anything new.  So what if she had come up with a new wrinkle, sprinkled in a little religion?  Jailhouse religion, hardly a new wrinkle, something to speed her release from prison.  More crap, he thought to himself.  He couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t lied to him.  She lied to everybody.  She lied to Ol’ Bert, she lied to people she met on the street, and she lied to him.  It was always the same.  He didn’t know why he had ever listened to her or why he even read her letters.
“You know what, hermano?” Jaime asked.
“What?”
“You and me, we could make a lot of money off this deaf, dumb, blind bro of yours.”
“Yeah, how’s that?” He asked, rolling over in his bunk and staring down at Jaime, who lay on his back, looking up, fingers laced beneath his head.
“Me and you, hermano, when they spring us from this joint, we could dance on down to Calneh and heist a few of those statues of his.  It’s not like he’s locked them away for safekeeping or nothin’.”
“Great, something to look forward to.”
“Something to think about.”
“Yeah,” Mark John said, rolling onto his back and staring up at the ceiling, featureless except for a single overhead light surrounded by a wire cage.  “Yeah, right.  And we do the big U-turn right back into the slammer for another ten or twelve.  Smart.”
“Hey man, what are they gonna do, put you in jail for stealing a few little statues from your own brother?  I don’t think so.”
Mark John let out a long stream of curses.
“You disagree with me, hombre?”
Mark John peered down at him over the edge of his bunk.  “I’m in here for allegedly assaulting him and his mother.  What do you think, genius?”
“Oh, hey, allegedly, hombre.”  He laughed.  “You allegedly in jail, too, hombre?”
“I was innocent,” Mark John said.  “All I remember is walking into this house and some big nigger--” He paused, instinctively glancing around and then remembering he was in a largely white cell block.  Still, he dropped his voice to explain, “Some big black monster punched my lights out.  Next thing I know, I’m waking up in the hospital with one hellacious headache and a broken arm.”
“Wow, that’s tragic.”
“Yeah.  I’m the one who’s busted up, and the pigs bust me instead of the other guy.”
“So what you’re saying is, you’re innocent, right?” Jaime asked.
“Right.  I’m innocent.  You bet I am.”
“Wow, me too,” Jaime said.  “Can you believe it, two guys in the same jail cell, both of us innocent.  What do you think the odds are on that?”
Wearily, Mark John told him to shut up.
“No, hombre, I mean it!” He insisted, punching the mattress above him for emphasis.  “Think about it.  Everybody on the outside thinks any two guys on the inside are guilty.  But when you’re inside like us, everybody knows any two guys are innocent, maybe any three or four guys, in fact.”
“Why not all of us?” Mark John muttered under his breath, as he stuck his fingers in his ears to keep the sound out.  Two years in jail--two years!  Nearly his second anniversary!  Only six or seven more to go, if he kept his nose clean and could make early parole.  Thank God he had sold all his dope before he walked into that house in Calneh.  Except for that, he might have been facing life!
“You know what?” Jaime demanded, talking louder, as if knowing Mark John was trying to block out his voice.
He gave up.  Six or seven more years with a cellie like Jaime would seem like life.  He didn’t think he could possibly face that much more time.  He would go insane for sure.
“What?”
“When we make it out, it’s not us who owes society, but society owes us.  What’s a few statues compared to fifteen years of my life?”
“Yeah, I see your point.”
“Yeah, no deaf, dumb, blind cripple guy can stop me from taking what belongs to me--us, I mean, man.”
“Riighht,” Mark John agreed, feeling his eyelids grow heavier by the second.  Day in, day out, it was the same old story, once in a while a variation worked in here, a variation worked in there, but essentially the same.  Sometimes it was his version of the truth, or of life, sometimes it was Jaime’s, and when it came down to it, neither really mattered a hill of beans.
The painful fact was that he was caught, stuck in a cage with no real hope for escape, and the walls and bars were closing in, with Jaime in the meantime yammering incessantly, driving him ever closer to the edge.



****



Chapter 42

Embarked upon her daily walk (the best possible exercise for most folks, being low impact and not meant to set her heart racing until it should be nigh ready to explode), Stella gave up three-quarters of the way around the block, exhausted as much spiritually as she was physically.  It was a mistake not to have waited for Ioletta, who, ever since her notion to diet a long year ago, had done laps around the neighborhood each day like it was a march around the walls of Jericho.  Luckily, the decaying but lovely old pergola across from Alliance Baptist Church offered Stella Jo a place of refuge.  As weak as she was, she still didn’t wish to have anyone find her laid out on the sidewalk or in the gutter.  She collapsed in the shade of the pergola’s intertwining Scuppernong vines, vines planted by the late Jacob Ayers’ great-granddaddy a decade before the opening shots of the Civil War.  It was difficult to remember having ever been well, of having ever felt good.  Her first bout with leukemia a year ago (only a year!) and its wasting effects seemed to have blended in with this latest bout, like competing ocean waves meeting in the middle and overrunning each other.
In reality the day was bright, warm, and humid, more like Calneh in early fall than in early March, but the world seemed to be closing in around her, her vision progressively tunnel-like, perhaps preparatory to the confines of a pine box?  Elbows on knees, she wept into her hands, unable to recall when life had been anything but a struggle.  Memories of Angel’s botched delivery, of Duane’s kidnapping, of Leonard’s grief-stricken death, stormed to the surface, and behind them blew the storm of Mark John Davies’ sudden appearance, his Duane-self long-obliterated, his curses when it was revealed she was his mother.
“That’s all she wrote,” was what the prison guard had said.  She could certainly believe that now.  Every week, sometimes twice a week, she sent a note to Duane at the State Penitentiary.  Every week, six days a week, she expected to hear from him, to find a letter in her mailbox.  Every week, six days a week (seven, when sufficiently obsessed to try the mailbox on Sundays, hoping she’d overlooked it Saturday), she was disappointed.  He would never answer her letters, never admit that she was his mother and that he was her son.
God could care, she could care, friends and neighbors could care.  But if Duane didn’t care?  What use was it for all of them to care, when Duane didn’t care?  He had a mind and will of his own and the prerogative to believe what he wanted to believe.  If he didn’t want to believe, to admit to the truth, then he didn’t have to do it, no matter how much evidence stared him in the face.  She couldn’t will him to do otherwise, and as much as she might wish it, neither could anyone else.
That’s all she wrote.  In a few weeks she would be dead, and then it really would be all she wrote.
If you carry me, I’ll carry you.
Stella’s pulse quickened.  Trucks rumbled by, children screamed and laughed in their street games, and a breeze ruffled her grape-leaf cocoon.  Had she really heard that familiar inner voice?
If you carry me, I’ll carry you.
What do you mean, Lord? She prayed silently.  It was ridiculous.  The docs had nearly killed her with chemo and radiation and stolen her spleen besides (she was still bitter about her spleen even if she didn’t know what the thing was supposed to do).  She was too sick to carry an infant, much less Him.  Giggles might have surfaced, except that the story of Sarah’s laughter at the promise of Isaac came flooding into her mind.
“Can I have a nickel?” Piped a child’s voice.
“Can I have a nickel?”  Echoed an equally childish voice.
Stella leaned back against leafy grape vines, wishing she could see the faces attached to the two voices, which had come from no more than a few yards behind her, but felt strenthless, as Ioletta would have put it, to stand to her feet.  The first voice she’d heard was Tweetybirdish, a girl’s, she thought, the second a boy’s voice, though little deeper than the first.
“You want a nickel, go out in the street and holler for a pickle!” Shouted the boy.
“I’m hungry!” Another voice cried shrilly.
Other voices chimed in.  “Go out in the street and holler for a pickle!  Ya’ll get yer nickel!”
“Holler for a pickle!  Holler for a pickle!  Ya want yer nickel?”
Smiling wearily to herself, Stella peered out beyond the latticework archway.  Hollering for a pickle was something her Leonard had teased the boys with when they were young tykes.  Across the street, men were trimming Alliance Baptist’s new building in stone.  She wished one of them would see to the shrill, hectoring voices.  But it was impossible to worry a man about a children’s game when he was in the middle of his work.  Men seemed inured to shrill voices, whether a little girl’s or a wife’s.  Especially a wife’s, as she recalled.
Her cane in hand, she checked the knot on her scarf before venturing back onto the sidewalk.  Children tended to scatter, if the scarf fell away from her bald head.  Maybe her hollow eyes frightened them, too.  You would not have recognized her any more than friends who had not seen her in the past few months, aghast when they ran across her at Piggly Wiggly or the Rexall store or during one of their thrice yearly visits to church.
There were four children dancing and hollering around two waifs.  When the four saw Stella, looming over them as if a ghost had appeared from thin air, they scattered with shrieks of terror.  She felt stares from across the street, where the men labored upon their scaffolding.  The remaining two urchins (that being the word, other than waifs, that came to mind, rising unbidden from a buried memory of Dickens) gazed at her with serious, hungry eyes.  Please sir, MORE!  Something told her that these two children were all too familiar with illness, too familiar to be frightened by her appearance like the neighborhood children, who saw her weekly and still reacted as though scared out of their wits.
The two children were dirty and dressed in dirtier rags.  A girl of no more than five or six years of age held a little boy perhaps three years old.  The fact that the children were of indeterminate race, though their hair was both kinky and dirty blonde and standing on end, was irrelevant to her, as was their ripe smell.
“It’s lunchtime, children,” Stella said, gesturing for them to follow.  Whatever you do to the least one of these, you do unto Me.  The Voice had said, If you carry me, I’ll carry you, but it didn’t enter her head that she should take its meaning literally, and in any case she could not have carried either child.  Behind her, little feet hesitated only momentarily.
Stella moved slowly, steadying herself with her cane, lacking the strength to walk faster.
“Are you sick, lady?”
“Yes, honey, I am,” she said, glancing toward the little girl, who now walked beside her little brother, holding his hand.  “It’s not the kind of sickness you can catch from someone else.”
The girl’s eyes were big, serious, and blue, with long, fair eyelashes.  “What you have?” She asked.
“Leukemia.”  Just another word for death.
“Oh,” the little girl answered back.  “Moms died from cancer.”  Evidently, the time for crying about it was in the past; no tears streaked her thin, grimy face.
“My name is Stella.  What’s yours, honey?”
“Miss Theron,” she said.  “And my brother is Mr. Luke, though I just call him Lukey.”
“Well, Miss Theron, I hope you and Mr. Luke are fond of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”
It seemed they were, for they smiled at each other and smacked their lips, smacking them still as they arrived at Stella’s gate, their eyes growing in wonder as they spied the statues in the yard and the pirate-eyed man balanced on a wooden stool, hammering away at a block of stone.  Hearing their bright, twittering voices, Angel was quick to lay down his tools and grab up his elbow crutches.
#
Ioletta stood in the kitchen doorway, a letter in each hand, one brought straight from Stella’s mailbox, the other from her own.
“You know you’ll have to call Social Services, Stella Jo,” she said, contemplating the children.  They paid no attention to her, evidently much more interested in Angel, who sat between them at the table, eating a sandwich.
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Stella Jo answered.
“Don’t know?” She responded irritably.
“You just go on about your own business and don’t worry about these children, Ioletta.”
“The second I saw you walkin’ to your house, these chil’ren in tow, I jist knowed you had somethin’ in your head about ’em.”
“When the Lord tells me to do something, Ioletta Brown, I have to do it.”
“The Lord?  Lordamighty!  In your condition?  How you gonta take care of these children when you cain’t take care of yourself?”
“Nevertheless--” Stella sighed, knowing it wasn’t much of an answer.  Inspired, she added, “You should watch sayin’ those Lordamightys of yours.  It’s not reverent at all.”
“Lorda--Lorda--” Ioletta spluttered.  “Well I--”
“You know it’s not, there’s no use arguing.”
“Sometimes I think you should have your head examined,” Ioletta retorted.  “I don’t think it’s the Lord who woulda tol’ you to watch after no children.  You’re just hearin’ things--it’s all them drugs, girl.”
Smiling brightly, Stella asked, “Would you like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?”
“No, I don’t want no sandwich,” she said, disgusted, fanning herself with Stella’s letter.  “You know you can’t change the subject so easy, offering me somethin’ to eat--leastwise not no more.”
“There’s milk or tea, if you like, too.”
“Well--” Ioletta began, rolling her eyes in exasperation.  “I’ll have myself a glass of tea, without sugar, mind you, and let you tell me what your letter says, and then I’ll tell you what mine says.”
“Is it from Duane?”
“No, it ain’t from no Duane--but this here’s from Lamarr,” she said, clutching her own letter to her breast.  She handed over Stella’s letter and reached for a glass from the shelf.  While Stella glanced at the return address and tore open the envelope, she poured iced tea for herself.
“So what does our jailbird friend have to say for herself this time?” Ioletta asked.  She waved her hand in front of her nose, for the first time catching a whiff of the children.  “Whooiee!  These children of yours do have their own fragrance about them, Stella Jo.”
Chin quivering dangerously, Stella ignored the remark as she laid the letter down on the table.  It hardly deserved being called a letter; the handwritten scrawl (which always demanded the strictest of attention and plenty of guesswork to decipher) was only two brief sentences.
“Why don’t you read us Lamarr’s letter first.  I could do with some good news about now.”
Ioletta frowned, and took a seat.  She felt like pinching her nose against the smell in the room but tore open the letter instead.  She read to herself to get the gist of the message first.
“Well?” Stella asked.  Ioletta’s jaw was working strangely.  Her breath seemed to come with difficulty.
“I don’t--” she muttered.
“Ioletta?”
Biting her lips, she began re-reading the letter from the beginning.  Nodding her head and still biting her lips, she rubbed at her eyes and stared at Stella.
“Is it something terrible?” Stella asked.
“He’s not comin’ home for his vacation--he’s gone to Hawaii.”
“Hawaii?  That’s nice.”
“He’s got hisself hitched over there in Vietnam.”
“Hitched?  You mean married?  Our Lamarr?”
“What else?  That’s why Hawaii.  For their honeymoon.”
“To a Vietnamese girl?”
“No, to one of them Korean girls, I guess.”
“Let me see,” Stella said, holding her hand out for the letter.
Numbly, Ioletta drank from her glass of tea, as Stella began to read for herself.
“Looks to me like he was in an awful hurry when he wrote this,” she commented.
“Gives new meaning to hot to trot,” Ioletta muttered.  “Coulda warned his own mother.”
“It was someone he met in Korea.”  Stella slid the letter across the table to Ioletta.  “Aren’t you happy for him?”
Ioletta shook her head and shrugged her shoulders.  “Didn’t even get invited to my own son’s wedding--I jist don’t know about these young people today.”
“Better than a lot of them nowadays.”
“Yeah, seein’ they got themselves married, I guess.”
“I would call that good news.”
Ioletta shook her head, obviously struggling with this new turn of events.  “Kyla,” she said.  “That don’t sound like no Korean name.”
“I guess not.”
Ioletta’s eyes brightened.  “It don’t sound like no white girl’s name, neither.”
Stella nodded.
“’Course, he couldn’t jist come out and tell me,” Ioletta complained.  “What about your letter?”
Stella’s chin quivered again.  She knuckled a tear from her eye.  “Mertie’s cancer has returned.”
Ioletta felt her breath nearly taken away.  It was several moments before she could meet Stella’s sorrowful gaze.  Shaking her head in resignation, she said, “If it’s one thing you and I both know, we all have to die sometime.”
Stella stared at the letter and drummed her fingers lightly on the table.  “I have to help her somehow.”
“Help her?  You been helpin’ her all along, sendin’ her letters an’ packages, and goin’ to see her when you could.”
Stella’s eyes went from the letter to the children and back to the letter again.
“This have somethin’ to do with what the Lord tol’ you?” Ioletta asked.
“I don’t know.  Could be.  I’m not sure.”
“Just what did the Lord tell ya, anyhow?”
“He told me if I carry Him, He’ll carry me.”
“Hmmh.  Sounds like something He would say,” she admitted.  “So did He say if it was permanent like and how we’re to do it?”
“Oh, Ioletta, you do enough--too much, really.  I don’t know what I would do without you.  Aren’t you about wore out from helping me and everybody else who needs help around here?”
“And what if I am?” She said, fanning herself with Lamarr’s letter and glancing over at the children, who had each launched into another sandwich.  “I have to do what the Lord says, too, don’t I?”
At Stella’s nod of agreement, she said, “Don’t you think it’s about time these children done took a bath?  You got some old clothin’ they could wear?”
“I could rustle up some from somewhere, I guess,” Stella answered.  “As long as Miss Theron here doesn’t mind wearing boys clothing for a little bit.”
“That’s sure.  I know you don’t want them smellin’ to high heaven, when Child Welfare picks them up.”
Theron stared, her big blue eyes wandering between Stella and Ioletta, her mouth working the sandwich.
“’Course, I don’t suppose nobody has to know about them right away,” Ioletta added, her heart melting.  “Could be a relative or somebody will show up before then.  You any relatives around here, young lady?”
Mutely, Theron shook her head.
“Child don’t talk much,” Ioletta muttered.  “Should take like white on rice to Angel, I s’pose.”
In answer, the little girl hung on tightly to Angel’s arm and nuzzled his shoulder.  He squinted hard at the face so close to his own, and smiled.  On his other arm, the little boy hung on, smiling sunnily at both his sister and Angel.
Footsteps sounded from the hallway.  Hermione appeared with an armload of groceries.  She set the bags on the kitchen counter and smiled at the children.
“Now what miracle do we have here?” She asked cheerily.



****



Chapter 43

Meredith Bogans parked her beige Plymouth Valiant by the gate to the McIlhenny house.  From where she sat, she could see Michael McIlhenny, idiot savant (those were the words she had used in her initial reports to describe Angel years ago) working on one of his statues even while the two children in question, Theron and Luke Doe (no one having been able to trace them to any family in all of the state of Alabama), hung about him, playing their childish games, obviously heedless of the danger it was to their personal safety.  As heedless as Michael.  If he’d known the dangers, he wouldn’t have that eye patch, now would he?  Sure, he wore those plastic safety goggles now, but what about before?  As blind as he was, how could he help if something happened to the children?  And him mute and crippled, besides?
Where was Stella McIlhenny, their supposed caregiver, their foster mother?  Probably in her house, saying her prayers or something of the sort.  Religious fanatic were the two words she had used in her report to her superiors.  Meredith didn’t have much sympathy for religious folks.  Her parents had given her a strict Catholic upbringing, sending her to Catholic school for her education to make sure the only man in her life outside of her father was the parish priest. Running across a nun or priest on the street or in a local store still made her grind her teeth involuntarily.
As she swung out of her car, leather briefcase in hand, a gray, nondescript car drove slowly past.  The figure at the wheel peered at her and gave her a brief, fluttery wave of one hand.  The intense, steel-gray eyes sent a shudder of fear down her spine.  The man gave her the creeps.  It seemed like every time she made a visit to the McIlhennys, Chance Odoms was swooping around like a vulture.  If she hadn’t recognized him, she would have reported him to the cops as a suspicious character.  Suspicious character would have been a good addition to her report on the neighborhood, but then her immediate supervisor, who always seemed to ask more questions than normal when it came to Flowers Avenue, would have asked for a name to be appended to that description.
Still, anybody in his right mind could see from her reports that Stella Jo McIlhenny, a widowed leukemia victim unable to work most the time, was completely unfit to act as a foster parent to two orphans.  Even if she had been fit, which she most certainly was not, why did she want to raise two colored children?  It had to be the money.  (Never mind the County Department of Pensions and Security paid out its foster parents only enough to cover a food and clothing allowance for the children.)
Meredith was grateful she had thought to change into tennis shoes.  Newly laid gravel on the pathway to the house had chewed up her black pumps at her last visit.  Studiously ignoring Angel and her two foster clients, she strode purposefully up the path to the house.  The poor idiot (except for her official reports she never attached the word savant in thinking of or referring to him) hummed a tune as usual, the benighted children mimicking him and giggling.  Something obviously needed to be done to rescue them from this household before their lives could be forever warped.
As she mounted the stairs, fearful that they might cave under her weight, though she was a skinny woman and they would have laughed at her fears (if they could only have told her of the weight they had borne in their lifetime), she mentally noted an oversight in her reports.  Dilapidated had probably not been strong enough in her description of the house.  Her nerves were taut, as she waited at the door.  The porch vibrated (in sympathy?), as someone approached from within the house.
“Yes?” Ioletta said, opening the door and giving Meredith the once over.  Though Meredith didn’t know it, she wasn’t likely to impress Ioletta when she couldn’t seem to afford a crisply-ironed white blouse in which to conduct her business.
Meredith’s eyebrows rose dramatically.  “I’m here to see Mrs. McIlhenny.  Is she in, Mrs. Brown?”
“C’mon in,” Ioletta said, ushering her inside and shutting the door.  “Would you like some tea, Miss Bogans?”
Dutifully, Meredith followed her into the kitchen, noting to herself along the way that the house was neat and tidy.  From the exterior one would have expected a shambles.  But the interior, in her inspections over the last six months, had always seemed to be in decent order (except for that one incident of the chisels mislaid on the living room coffee table).  Chisels could put an eye out.  Hadn’t Mrs. McIlhenny learned that from experience?  She didn’t want another child injuring itself, did she?
She sat at the table and waited, while Ioletta poured them two small glasses of iced tea.
“I could find us some saccharin, if you like,” Ioletta offered.
“No, this is fine,” Meredith said, taking a sip and wrinkling her nose.  While she liked hot tea, she really did not care for the iced variety, especially unsweetened.  And saccharin?  Ick!  But then, she had no intention of staying longer than necessary.  She placed the glass on the table, and Ioletta did the same after a sip at her own.
“Is she napping?” Meredith asked.
“Napping?  Uh, no,” Ioletta said, absent-mindedly pulling at an earlobe.
“Where is she?” Meredith asked, glancing around the kitchen as though Stella could be hiding in one of its corners.
“Oh, she’s up at Owaloosa Federal.”
“Owaloosa?  In Georgia?” Meredith said in alarm.  “I thought you said she was here.  What’s she doing at the prison?”
“Visitin’ a dyin’ friend.”
“Then why--” Meredith started, and then clamped her mouth shut.  A suspicious, trapped look crossed her face.  Was Mrs. Brown’s niece waiting in the wings, ready to pounce again, wanting to know why she couldn’t adopt Theron and Luke?  Like the State would allow someone of Hermione Tharpewood’s ilk to adopt children...!
As the seconds lengthened, she realized she was alone in the house with Ioletta Brown.  The niece wouldn’t be jumping out at her anytime soon.  Her furtive glances settled into a disagreeable frown.  She wanted to ask Ioletta why she’d invited her in when she knew all along that Stella McIlhenny was not at home, but decided differently.  There was no use in openly antagonizing the woman, not when the woman was twice her size and they were within easy reach of each other.  Didn’t matter the woman had dropped tons of weight since she first met her, she still felt about as big as a pencil beside her.  She’d discovered much earlier in her career when it was safe to throw her weight around and when it was unsafe.  Now did not seem to be one of those safe moments.
Reaching for her briefcase, she pulled out a yellow legal pad and pen.  The sooner she completed her work and was out of there, the better.  She jotted down Stella’s full name.  Under it, she wrote absent, placed a long dash after it, and added prison.  In her reports, she always typed up the key words in capital letters.  She was sure those capitalized words would stick in the mind of her supervisors long after they had read her reports, even if the rest of what she wrote quickly faded.  There were so many reports, so many children to be supervised, along with their foster parents, that one had to devise a method to ensure a lasting impression was made.
Ioletta smiled briefly, watching her begin her work, and excused herself from the table.  She knew the routine.  The Child Welfare supervisor would check the kitchen and refrigerator to see that sufficient food for the maintenance of the children was in evidence, especially meat, milk, cereal, fruit and vegetables.  Then she would check the cleanliness of their rooms and sneak a peek into the bedroom closets, looking to make sure they had clothes to wear.  There had to be some form of proper accounting for the state’s expenditures, such as they were.
Ioletta was on the phone in the living room, as Meredith stood at the open refrigerator, taking notes.  It might be against official department policy to hold an inspection without the foster parent or parents being present, but like with most work, there were quotas and deadlines to be made, and one couldn’t always expect every situation to be ideal.
Ioletta seated herself on the top porch step and waited for the woman to emerge from the house.  In the yard, Angel chipped away at a new block of dark stone.  Theron and Lukey chased each other in a game of tag among the statues, their favorite game.
“How is Mrs. McIlhenny’s health?” Meredith inquired, her Bic ink pen poised over the legal pad.  She never used a pencil and eraser in her note taking.  Pencils were for people who made mistakes.
Ioletta glanced behind her in surprise.  Either she was losing her hearing or the caseworker was very light on her feet.  A truck rumbled by on the street, and she sighed in relief.  It had just been traffic noise.
“Actually, she’s taken another turn for the better, Miss Bogans.  God is surely good, isn’t He?”
Making no allowances for the goodness of God, the Bic pen scratched out a note.  Below, on the street, a black-and-white police car rolled to a stop, double-parking next to the beige Valiant.  The white woman’s eyes darted up from her work.  A policeman was climbing out of his car, ticket pad in hand.
A surprised bleat escaping her lips, Meredith dropped her legal pad and pen and bolted past Ioletta on the stairs.  Smiling to herself, Ioletta picked up the pen and paper, and carefully placed them inside the white woman’s briefcase.  On the sidewalk, the caseworker remonstrated with the officer, her shrill voice rising and falling, hands flung out in windmilling motions.  Unperturbed, the officer tore the ticket from his pad and handed it to her.
Ioletta hid a smile behind her hand, as Meredith stomped up the gravel pathway to the house.
“Another ticket!” She spluttered, throwing her hands up in disgust.  “Can you believe that?”
“What fo’ this time?” Ioletta mildly asked.
“Parking too far from the curb,” she answered, barely restraining a snarl.  “They must go by a quota system on this street!”
Soberly, Ioletta nodded her head, her expression revealing nothing, as she handed the briefcase to her.  “If you were African American, you’d be used to that sort of thang.”
Meredith opened her mouth, and closed it.  Opened it and closed it again.  Seemingly struck speechless, she turned and hurried down the stairs.  First Lukey waved sweetly, and then Theron, as she unlocked her car and slid inside.  She didn’t look or wave back, as she sped away.
Ioletta allowed herself a wide grin.  It was nice to know someone in the police department interested in keeping people like Meredith Bogans off her street.  She gave a fluttery wave of one hand, as a familiar gray car drove past, its driver having waved first.
#
Praying sometimes under her breath, sometimes aloud, Stella Jo sat at Mertie’s bedside, clasping hands with her through the bedrails, as Mertie hung onto life by the slender silver cord, the golden bowl cracked, by all means, but not yet shattered.
Light shone from the dying woman’s face (not that Stella wasn’t dying, just slower, like everyone else), a light Stella readily recognized as the glow of the spirit.  Eyes fluttering open, one last time Mertie woke on this side of the River.
Stella Jo leaned close to hear her words.
“Jesus has forgiven me, I know it,” Mertie said.
“Forgiven,” she agreed, gently squeezing her hand.
“And you, you forgive me?”
“I do,” she said, as solemnly as she had ever spoken those same two words to Leonard on the day of their wedding.  She had never felt it like she felt it now, but deep in her bones she understood that forgiveness was every bit as much of a covenant as marriage.
“I forgave you a long time ago,” she said, squeezing the hand again.  This time, Mertie did not squeeze back.  The dying woman’s face grew slack, the glow faded.  While she might not see it with the eyes of flesh, Stella, with an inner clarity reserved for the spirit, saw the dying woman wade eagerly into the broad River.  Waiting to meet her, with pierced hands outstretched, there was Someone whose infinite stride would easily carry her the rest of the way across.  In the realm outside of (yet inextricably joined with) the prison and its infirmary, Mertie advanced, arms flung wide to greet that Someone, and was taken up to taste death no more, safely escorted from this world and into another by the Master.
Seemingly in no hurry, a nurse inmate entered the room and switched off the buzzing heart monitor.  “All she wrote, huh?” She muttered.  “I’ll fetch the doctor.”
The doctor, a gray little man in a dingy white smock, returned moments later with the nurse and pried Stella’s fingers from Mertie’s.  He took the lifeless wrist in his hand to search for a pulse that was no longer there.
“Time of death, 4:20 p.m.,” he announced, recording the passing in Mertie’s chart and snapping it shut with a flourish, like an inmate happily crossing off another day on the calendar until he should be released.
Stella Jo looked at Mertie’s wasted, once pretty face.  Imperceptibly, she shook her head, while inside she shouted hallelujah!  If the nurse only knew!  If the frazzle-haired doctor only knew!  Mertie’s physical body was here, all right, but the real her, the new Mertie, was on a journey to the heavenly city, where neither moth nor rust, nor disease of any kind, could ever again bring corruption.



****



Chapter 44

He preferred the prison laundry to any of the other jobs they might have assigned him.  While handling the prison population’s soiled clothes was unavoidably messy and unsanitary (if he let himself think about it), it was also appealingly clean, once everything went through the wash and was pulled from the driers.  And yes, there was no arguing the fact it was hot, with hot driers constantly running and steam rising from the washers, or that there was any escape from the noise of the gas driers, either, the rumble of the giant spinning drums echoing from concrete walls.  But all of the above were balanced out by the necessity of being on the move from the beginning of his shift all the way to shift’s end, affording little time for him to think.
Thinking was something he didn’t want to do, not with the eternity of 87 more months of confinement staring him in the face.  In Laundry it was non-stop action.  Not adventure, mind you, but action.  Everything had a sense of order about it, too.  The clothing, blankets, and various linens came in dirty and disorganized, balled up in the big, rolling canvas bins, stinking of captivity and fear and despair, and they left clean, all of it folded, some items run through the steam presses prior to folding, and he was one of the men responsible for bringing order to the whole mess.  After three and a half years in the slammer, there was nobody who could fold sheets more precisely than he or do better at putting a knife-edge crease into a pair of sloppy coveralls.  Nobody.  Which was a switch for him, never being so clean in all his life or nearly as orderly.  Life on the road with Bert and Mertie had never left much time or reason for such niceties.
Strange, really, if he stopped to think about it.  Bert and Mertie, regardless of their circumstances, had always kept themselves scrupulously clean.  They might drive a junk heap of a pickup for their only transportation or a fine Cadillac they managed to steal in their travels, but in either case they always dressed well and paid careful attention to their grooming.  People don’t think you’re poor, if you’re clean and neat, he remembered his mother saying.  They don’t ask none too many questions, either, boy, he remembered Bert often chipping in.
That’s because cleanliness is next to godliness, Marky John, Mertie would cheerily say, and then pass the baton of her parental teaching duties to Bert.
You pay attention, boy.  Mark my word, a neatly dressed feller in an office gets away with a lot more than a poorly dressed bum on the street.  People don’t think a neatly dressed man can have stealing on his mind like a dirty bum, when all it takes to satisfy the bum is a few bucks to get by for a day or two, while the neat one is looking to steal the shirt off your back and the whole closet along with it, if he can.  Lots of people just naturally look the other way, when they see a neatly dressed man doing something he shouldn’t be doing.
Specially them preachers, he would say, grinning over at Mertie.  If they’re not the worst, looking and talking clean, and grabbin’ money at the same time from everybody...
To Mark John’s mind, something had never quite added up there, because while they kept themselves neatly groomed and looking good in their nice clothes, nice clothes seldom came his way, or even haircuts when he needed them.  In fact, he’d seen a lot of long stretches between haircuts until joining the Army.  They talked about him, told people in public how he was their innocent little boy, but when it came right down to it, that was the most attention he ever received from them.  The only other times were when Bert laid into him for talking to strangers.  Talking to strangers was forbidden, except when a stranger needed to be distracted into looking the other direction.  There was a lot of that, because Ol’ Bert preferred to drive cars belonging to other folks, at least until he could drop them at a local chop shop.
Still hot from the giant driers, the sheets and blankets were trundled to him at the folding tables, where the real work began.  In any given hour he could fold and bundle together 20 sets of sheets with their two blankets. The work kept him busy, but it wasn’t like he was killing snakes. A muggy September day, in combination with the heat and humidity of the Laundry building, pulled sweat from his pores like greasy raindrops.  He bent over and wiped his forehead on a clean sheet.  It wasn’t like anyone would ever know.
“Hey!  Tattoo!  Kid!”
He jerked to attention, caught red-handed.  Oscar Lederer, civilian manager of the Laundry, had come out of his office and shouted from across the room.  He could never seem to remember any prisoner’s name, calling everyone instead by whatever distinguishing feature was handy at the moment.  Attired in jeans and undershirt, like the rest of the inmate workers, left Mark John subject to the nickname of “Tattoo.”  There were plenty of tattoos in the prison population, and Mark John wasn’t the only gaudily tattooed prisoner working the laundry.  Two other men came to attention at the same time.
Lederer stabbed an unlit cigar in his direction.  “You!”
“Yeah?” Mark John said, straightening his stacks of sheets.
“C’mere, kid.  In my office!”
He disappeared through his office door.  Mark John scowled and unhappily pushed his work aside.  It wasn’t like he actually enjoyed doing laundry, but he enjoyed interruptions even less.  Especially when they came without warning from Lederer.
The manager had seated himself at his beat-up steel office desk.  Standing beside the desk, as if waiting for him, was a prison guard, muscular arms folded over his chest.
“Somebody here to see you, son,” Lederer told him in a subdued tone of voice.  He gestured with his cigar toward the wall.
“McIlhenny-Davies?”
Mark John’s eyes had been on the guard, and only peripherally had he been aware of another presence.  At hearing his name, he turned and saw the prison chaplain seated behind him.  He scowled, knowing all too well that prison chaplains did not appear from thin air without good reason.
“No McIlhenny to it,” he said curtly, to cover a sudden wave of anxiety.
The chaplain nodded, not arguing.  He held an envelope in one hand.  “Do you mind, Mr. Lederer, if Mr. Davies and I have a moment of privacy?”
Lederer frowned, and reluctantly pushed himself to his feet.  The chaplain waited until he made his exit.  The guard remained.  The envelope was proffered to Mark John.
“I’m sorry, but I have very bad news for you, son.”
Mark John stepped back a pace, as if snake bit, and folded his arms over his chest.  Lederer sometimes called him kid, but he’d never heard him call anyone son like he had a moment ago.  It was far worse, under these circumstances, to hear the chaplain call him the same.
“What’s the matter, son, can’t you read?”
“I can read, I’m not stupid.”
“Hey-hey,” the guard warned him from behind.  “There’ll be no disrespect.”
Mark John’s eyes were on the envelope, but he didn’t volunteer to reach out and take it.
“Would you rather I just tell you?” The chaplain asked.
Mark John nodded, afraid that if he reached out, his hand would betray him with shaking.
“I’m terribly sorry but your mother has died.  She passed away from cancer the day before yesterday.”
“Th-th-that’s a l-l-lie!” Mark John stammered.
The guard acted reflexively, cuffing him across the back of the head, felling him to the floor.  Mark John gathered himself for another blow, covering his head with his hands.  The guard reached for his baton.
“Please!” The chaplain blurted.  “Please, give him a chance to speak, Officer.”
The guard hesitated, and the chaplain addressed Mark John.  “What do you mean by that, son?”
“S-she’s a l-liar, sir,” he managed to say.  “She’s always been a liar.”
The chaplain glanced at the guard, who took a step back but kept his hand on his baton.
“Well now, that may very well be, but I don’t think she made this one up,” he said, eyeing him sympathetically.  “We received the notice of her death from the women’s facility at Owaloosa.  Because you were listed as her next of kin.”
What followed was a blur to Mark John, and would probably always remain one.  Hours later, sitting at the desk in his cell and staring down at his empty hands, he wished he hadn’t refused the letter of notification.  Without that piece of paper, his mother’s death simply didn’t seem real to him.  It was much more like an idle daydream, like his memory of having been escorted back to his cell by the chaplain and the guard.
One thing for sure, though, this place he called home was real enough.  The never ending noise of men, of whispers and shouts and murmurs of conversation wafting from cell to cell off concrete floors and walls, was real.  Real as the smells, of sweat and feces and disinfectant.  As if to test its reality, he rose from the chair and wrapped his hands around the cold steel bars.  He leaned forward, head resting against them...leaned back, leaned forward, leaned back, leaned forward, slowly battering his brow of bone against unyielding steel.  Warmth trickled down his cheeks, salty tears mixing with salty blood.
Maybe she wasn’t dead.  Maybe they were wrong.  Maybe it was a lie--she was awfully good at lying--and sooner or later, the authorities would figure it out.
Or it was just a bad dream... But what was one more bad dream, when all of life was a nightmare?  He had gone from his years with Bert and Mertie into Army life in Vietnam with its jungle firefights, and from there traveled a short road that led to prison.  Not only was life a nightmare, he was proof that it was a downward spiral.  He wished it could be different, but he knew things didn’t get better, not like they did in some stupid children’s book or in even stupider movies.  Maybe for some people, but not for him.  It was his destiny, his fate, that life only went from bad to worse on the journey to hell.
The immediate now, death and blood and tears, was simply another leg on the downward spiral, another agonizingly slow turn towards the inevitable.  It was a place he had been before, and would be again, with the occasional side trip thrown in.  But the overall direction was always the same--crushing and inevitable.
He stopped battering himself and stood still, eyes closed to the corridor beyond his cell.  Footsteps approached.  Across the way, in the cell opposite his own, a man began cursing, and a guard called out for silence.
“The man’s mother’s died!  Can’t you let him have some peace and quiet?” The guard whispered savagely.
“Sorry,” came the heartfelt reply.
Mark John returned to the desk, and sat unmoving with his head in his hands.
“You all right, Davies?” The guard asked.  The voice was sympathetic.  Far more guards were sympathetic to the prisoners than the prisoners allowed themselves to admit, but it was sympathy and compassion that did not last long when no one dared show appreciation for it.  Word traveled too far and too fast among the prisoners that a certain guard was soft, or that a guard wanted something he shouldn’t be wanting, a stool pigeon or something worse…
“All right,” Mark John mumbled, knowing the guard would continue to pester him for an answer.  “I’m all right.”  For good measure he threw in a few half-hearted curses, and the guard ambled off.  It would be difficult to say if he’d been offended or if it was what he expected from an inmate.
Hours later, when Jaime returned from a productive day of stamping out license plates in the prison factory, Mark John still sat at the desk, his hands over his face.  Jaime sat on his bunk and immediately lit a cigarette.  Silently contemplating the back of Mark John’s head?  Hoping his gaze would penetrate hair and bone, let him see if he really had a brain?
“The word is,” he drawled, “your mother died.”  Not “passed on,” or “went to the Man upstairs,” or “went to heaven,” just a cold “died.”
“Yeah,” Mark John replied, every muscle in his body tensing.
Jaime stretched out on his bunk with a sigh, and puffed away on the cigarette.  “Was it the lady who sent you all those care packages?”
“No!” He nearly spat.
“Ah, so it was La Madre del Diablo--”
Those were the wrong words, calculatedly wrong, like gasoline thrown on the fires of his pent up fury.  Mark John spun out of the chair and was on him like a wild animal.  His first blow crushed the cigarette in Jaime’s mouth and was followed by a flurry of punches impossible to counter.
Several guards came running in response to the screams of inmates in surrounding cells, screams of encouragement to the combatants, screams of approval for the impromptu entertainment it provided.  The guards, seeing it was Jaime taking it on the chin, waited until Mark John paused to catch his breath.  Then they entered the cell and waded in with their batons.
“Two for the Hole!  Two for the Hole!” They shouted, dragging Mark John out first.  It surprised them that while both men’s faces were bloodied, Mark John’s was bruised and caked with blood.
Lying in a fetal position in Solitary that night, he reflected that the day had not been a total loss.  For one, he had proven he wasn’t about to be a pushover for Jaime any longer.  For another--well there wasn’t another, when it came down to it.  Well, maybe one thing--the knot he’d received on the back of his head in Lederer’s office didn’t smart as much any more.  Or if it did, he couldn’t distinguish it from the mass of other knots and welts on his body, or for that matter from the pain in his heart.



****



Chapter 45

Solitary.  The Hole.  It was where he dreamed of abductions.
The place was a cell, nothing more, nothing less.  A cell with three walls, and bars for a fourth, and a “porch” beyond, with an outer door and a window for the guard to spy on him at regular intervals.  It wasn’t an infamous tiger cage such as he had seen more than once in Nam, meant to break a man’s body as much as his will.  It wasn’t meant to break you physically like that, but nonetheless was meant to break a man.  Snatched out from the general prison population and left to confront one’s aloneness, to have little or no contact with other human beings for days or weeks, or even months on end, and to languish where the light of day and a blue sky gradually receded into memory like a distant dream--well, that broke a lot of men in short order.  Maybe it should have broken Mark John Davies in short order, too, broken him in shorter order than a lot of the inmates.  He wasn’t like a lot of them, reared in the cities, where the canyons between buildings were shadowed and sunless, or even in the suburbs, where block after block, mile after mile, the houses marched on in their sameness.  He was a man of the open road and of wide skies.  Life with Bert and Mertie had guaranteed that.  They never stayed in one place for long, not with someone always after them, and them looking to the interstates as thousand-mile-long escape routes.
And when they did set out roots among other human beings, which is a far cry from setting down roots, it was more often than not at some secluded farmstead or ranch, where transients either working the fields or wrangling animals were less likely to raise suspicions.  Bert had perhaps been wrong about raising suspicions, though; certainly those people who live in seclusion are rarely not curious about their neighbors.  But if he wanted to avoid others meddling in his affairs, in that at least he usually succeeded.  Which is not to say that he could manage to stay out of trouble even in secluded country.  If not born to trouble, he willingly searched it out on his own.
The Hole, for a man used to a regular sort of family and to having friends or neighbors near at hand, was like falling down a dark well or maybe like life under a rock, where you can’t see others and others can’t see you, and where yelling for help brings only friendless, hollow echoes.  For Mark John, yanked from the safety of his mother’s arms and Flowers Avenue and Jeff Davis Elementary, yanked from small town to small town and one isolated farm to another across the western half of the country, and from friendships never quite fully-formed, the Hole was just more of the same.  Certainly, in comparison, it was better than the clamor of life in an Army barracks or a prison cell block.
#
In darkness relieved only by dim light that filtered in through the Hole’s small rectangle of tempered glass, he imagined stars overhead.  He had been taught the names of the major constellations as a boy, and now he put that knowledge to use, pointing out each one of them as he had learned them from an old ranch hand somewhere in Montana (or was it Colorado?).  Pulsing like diamond necklaces on black velvet, the stars seemed to call to him, their massive gravitational forces to pull at him, until he felt as though he might fall right off the face of the earth and into their waiting arms...
The stars shine in the night sky, and on the horizon a crescent moon rises over low hills.  He hears the sound of footfalls.  Someone is running but he doesn’t yet know who.  Behind him, before him, all around him, stretch miles and miles of plains, every square yard nothing but rock and dust.
Added to the footfalls he hears breathing and the growing sound of a heartbeat, none of them in sync.  He catches a glimpse of running feet, of dust kicked into the moonlit air.
A fourth sound is added--hoofbeats.  At first the hoofbeats are distant or possibly they come from a lone horse.  But that is about to quickly change.  He sees running feet again, this time moving faster.  The frequency and volume of each breath, of each footfall, of each heartbeat, grows.  Now they are beginning to come into sync.
The volume of hoofbeats grows.
He is in a race in the dark.  Up ahead he expects to see the hills drawing closer--and instead sees them receding into the distance.  The feet are almost a blur, but they seem to be going nowhere.  The hills and the moon are yet more distant, growing eternally inaccessible.  Fueled by fear, heartbeat and sharply labored breathing and footfalls are almost one.
The hoofbeats are no longer that of a lone horse.  They are obviously something much more dangerous.  It has become the sound of a stampede, and if he doesn’t get out of the way he’ll be trampled underfoot by ten thousand horses.  And then, it happens!  He falls, tumbling end-over-end-over-end-over-end through the dust, with moon and stars and dirt revolving about his head.
All is still.  No more footfalls, no more running feet.  Just sharp breaths and a hammering heart and what could now be, instead of stampeding horses, the roar of a helicopter.  He looks up and sees neither horses nor a chopper.  A UFO hovers overhead, lights strobing ominously.
From a black hole in the belly of the ship, a gangplank snakes to the ground.  Out spills a horde of little green men.  They swarm over him like a tide, grabbing at him, chittering noisily.  He hears screams of terror, and knows they are his own.
The little green men swarm up the gangplank, carrying him aloft.  As he is about to be swallowed by the black hole, two disembodied human heads hove into view.  He cries out in his struggle to escape, and manages one last look at the earth he’s leaving behind.  There, in the UFO’s eerie lights, a little boy is sprawled in the dirt.  The face is the same as his own.  The legs are not.  They are thin sticks lying at impossible angles.
The crippled boy whimpers. Tears stream down his cheeks.  Struggling is futile.  He is left behind.
Again, the disembodied heads loom over him.  The little green men sweep him into the darkness…
He awoke in an icy sweat, with knees drawn up under his chin and his arms shielding his head.  Blood pounded in his ears, marking time like a metronome in the vast, eternal darkness.  Every joint felt as though bound by ice crystals, and every extremity rimed by frost.  He heard creaking noises as his body slowly unfolded itself.  His sight registered nothing.  Hands outstretched for obstacles, like a man struck blind, he explored the limits of the walls, the bars, the floor around him, until he cracked one knee up against the steel bed frame.  Reassured by pain, he lay back down and was at last able to force open his eyes.  There was light in the Hole, shadowy, it was true, but nonetheless softly invading the cell from beyond the barred door.
He wiped tears from his eyes.  Years would pass before the disembodied heads resolved themselves into two faces he recognized.
#
“I found this and thought it might be something you wanted to keep.”
Mark John opened one eye for his new cell mate.  While the authorities had returned him straight to his old cell from the Hole, Jaime had been transferred out, not just to another cell but to another facility.  Thank God, his godawful wall hangings had made the transfer with him--a matchstick Mission church, matchstick burros, matchstick sombreros, and worst of all a matchstick crucifix with its suffering Christ crudely drawn in felt tip marker.  Losing Jaime was no loss, that was for sure.  But the new man didn’t know the rules and would have to be taught, if he didn’t know better than to touch other people’s stuff.  Then again, Jaime had never been much for following the rules of prison etiquette.  Mark John hoped his new “cellie” would be different.  He didn’t want to see another Jaime taking the old Jaime’s place.  If the universe was crazy enough to send him the same--
“What is it?” he asked tiredly.  Coming from the Hole after a month’s isolation left him feeling disjointed and out of sorts, like he’d been drugged, or like he’d stepped from one world into another.
The new cellie held out his hand, offering a flattened wad of paper held between his thumb and forefinger.  “I know it looks like trash, but I thought I better double check before tossing it.”
Mark John reached for the piece of paper.  The other man watched, waiting to see what he would do with it, and was answered with an insolent stare.
“If you’re worried, I didn’t read it--” he said, turning away to sit at the desk.
Just so long as the new cellie understood.  With barely a glance at what was in his hand, Mark John crushed the flattened wad of paper and tossed it toward the wastebasket.
“Trash, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry, thought it might be a letter somebody would want to keep.”
“What’s your name?” Mark John asked.
“Cal Jankowski.  And to save you the time and trouble, yes, Jankowski is a Polish name.”
Mark John peered over his bunk and saw the man was busy with something at the desk.
“I never met me a Po-lack.”
Cal Jankowski was blond, of medium height and build.  He snickered in response, evidently unoffended and more interested in what he was doing than in arguing.
“I said I never met me a Po-lack before.”
“Well, most of us are smart enough to stay out of jail.  That’s probably why a bird like you never met one before.”
“Oh, a wiseacre Po-lack.  So what’s a wiseacre Po-lack doing in the ’Bama Big House?”
“Wishing I was a whole lot smarter,” he said.
Even in his disoriented, weakened state, Mark John had to chuckle.  He looked again over the edge of his bunk and glimpsed a ruler in his cell mate’s hand.  Gradually, he realized a picture of a church was taking shape.  He groaned loudly enough for the other man to hear.
Cal continued to work.  “What’s your problem?”
“You Catholic?  My last cellie had crucifixes and churches and--and all that crap--all over the wall.  He was one, stupid...”
Cal waited until Mark John’s voice trailed off in the usual curses, before answering.  “No, I’m not Catholic.”
“Religious, though.”
“No,” he said, indifferently glancing over his shoulder.  “My old man was a preacher before he decided he could make more money selling real estate, but I don’t believe in that stuff.  It’s just that drawing up plans keeps my hands busy, and churches are some of the most architecturally interesting pieces to work on.  Good discipline for the mind.”
“Hmmh.”  Mark John had taken a quarter of mechanical drawing at one of the high schools he’d visited in his life with Bert and Mertie.  “So what did you do, stab somebody with a compass?”
“Is that how the criminal mind works?”
“Bashed his head in with your T-square, huh?”
“Resisting arrest, assaulting an officer,” Cal answered reluctantly.
“What?  You a car thief or something?  A bank robber?”
He sighed.  “Civil rights marcher,” he admitted.
“Whooieeee!” Mark John said, laughing.  “You really aren’t one of those smart Po-lacks.  Here in the South?  Don’t you know they don’t like nigger lovers down here?”
“Everything was fine, until the Gestapo picked me out of the crowd and tickled me with their nightsticks.”
He turned and tapped his nose with one finger.  Mark John had failed to notice the twisted, disfigured nose.  Over his right eye there was a bony lump in the middle of his brow ridge.
“I was in the hospital for nearly a month.  They didn’t fix my nose properly, and there wasn’t much to do about the fractured skull, except to let it heal.  They arrested me the day I walked out of the hospital.”
“True story?” Mark John asked.
“True story.”
“So then, what you’re saying is--” he began, suddenly tittering.
“Yes?”
“You’re innocent!” Mark John exploded in a gale of laughter.  “Me too!  Me too!”
The new cellmate stared, lips compressed in a thin smile.  He waited until the laughter subsided.  “Actually, I did resist arrest, and I did assault an officer--more than one, when it comes down to it.”
“You’re not saying you were innocent?”
“I wasn’t about to lie there and let them beat me to death--no, I wasn’t innocent, not innocent as charged, at least.”
Mark John felt as though the world reeled about his head.  Maybe it was the change in coming from Solitary.  Maybe it was the shock of Jaime’s sudden transfer.  Sometimes he found any change in routine disturbed him.  Or was it that he felt almost as if a fresh breeze were blowing through the cell?
“You’re probably the only honest man in the joint,” he commented at last.
“But for the grace of God,” Cal muttered in return, blissfully unaware that irony was wasted on his new cellmate.
Behind him, Mark John swung one leg over the edge of his bunk and rolled out of bed.  A second later, he shouldered Jankowski aside and bent over to search the wastebasket.
“Where’d it go?” He demanded.
Cal scowled irritably, too preoccupied with the plans for his magnificent cathedral to consider why Mark John might rummage through the trash.
“Where’d it go?” Mark John screamed, at the same time shoving him away from the desk.
The suddenness of the attack caught Cal off balance.  Except for an old playground trick borrowed perhaps from watching Batman and Robin or the Green Hornet, he would have been sent flying against the cell bars.  Instead, he reached out as he fell and grabbed for Mark John’s undershirt.  The real trick was to land on his back without injury while planting one foot in the center of his opponent’s chest.  Momentum did the rest.  The look of sheer terror on Mark John’s face as he spun over his head was almost worth landing in the Alabama State Pen.
His new cellie’s scream of surprise was cut short by his impact against the bars of their cell.  Jankowski rolled to his feet and stood over him, hands on knees, staring down.  No blood.  Not yet.  His legs and arms didn’t seem at odd angles, either.  Just a long, drawn out groan.
“Where did what go?” He demanded.
“The letter!” Mark John said, groaning still.
“Letter?”
“The one you found!” Mark John managed through gritted teeth.
“Oh.”  He swiveled around and saw the letter at once, on the floor underneath his bunk.  Scraping it out with his foot, he kicked it in Mark John’s direction.
“If this was your idea of proving you’re the Alpha male, forget it,” Cal said.  “I’m smarter than you and I know how to take care of myself.”
“What’s an Alpha male?” Mark John asked from the floor.  The paper wad was now in his hand, clutched as if it was a diamond.
“The Alpha--aw, nuts,” he said, falling onto his bunk, knowing he was wasting his breath.  It was obvious his new cell mate was uneducated and unstable, and it was perfectly obvious to him that he needed to quickly learn how to deal with the man, both to save his own sanity and to keep out of trouble with the prison authorities.
“Think you could teach me how to draw like you?”
Cal was a man of deep thought and deeper concentration, sinking quickly into a world of his own to consider his problems and how to deal with them, when the voice seemingly spoke from out of a subterranean place in his consciousness.
“What?” He asked, unsure of whether he’d heard a voice or not.
“I said, could you teach me how to draw like that--houses and churches and stuff?  You know?”
“Teach you drafting, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
He exhaled through pursed lips.  He was thinking.  “It’s not like we have the proper instruments--the proper tools or books,” he said doubtfully.
“We could make them or maybe order them from the outside,” Mark John said, slowly getting to his feet.  He waved both hands, his excitement growing.  “We could maybe see if there’s something in the prison library!”
Cal stared from his bunk, thinking of the possibilities.  Even without the proper tools, he had always been able to improvise.  A tack and a piece of string knotted around a Ticonderoga pencil stub served for a compass.  A beat up, six-inch transparent plastic ruler stood in for a professional one, while a balsa wood yardstick cut into two pieces and tacked together approximated his T-square.  He couldn’t do precision work with such garbage for instruments, but in the nearly forty-two months he’d spent in the pen, he’d nevertheless been able to keep himself sharp by making do.  And as a former architecture student, now prisoner of the State of Alabama, it wasn’t like he was seeing big commissions for his drawings of houses, churches, and museums, all executed on college-ruled paper.  He wondered if training an unstable mind in the art and science of draftsmanship, even of architecture, could properly channel it, give it better foundations or moorings, or if in the end he would simply have himself an unstable draftsman for a cellie.  He certainly didn’t have any inflated hopes of someday raising the man to his own level of skill and knowledge.
“I guess we could try,” he said, still uncertain, thinking it would be little better than an experiment.
“Oh, not try,” Mark John corrected him, as he climbed back onto his bunk.  “It’s my chance man, I’ve always wished I could draw like that.  I know we can do it--we’ll start tomorrow.”
“All right, okay,” Cal muttered, unbuttoning his jeans in preparation for bed.  When his head hit the pillow and the lights went down on the cell block moments later, he was wondering about his cell mate’s letter.  What had that been about?  Had the man forgotten about it?  Would he just as easily forget about wanting to learn drafting by morning?  Just how unstable was he?
“Hey, man,” Mark John said in the half-light, the darkest it gets on a cell block because of security lighting.
“Yes?” He responded.  He wasn’t one to use yeah in answering anyone.  Like his drawings, his mind was too orderly, too disciplined, to sink quite that far into verbal laziness.
“Why would you care about some Negro’s rights?”
Momentarily stunned, he didn’t answer.  No one ever asked him that question in prison; instead, it was always about why he was a nigger lover.  Mark John’s question gave him pause; it seemed to suggest an open mind, which he wouldn’t have expected from his new cellie.
“You still there?” Mark John asked, poking his head over the edge of his bunk.  “You out for the count?”
“I’m here, don’t worry, I haven’t gone anywhere,” he said.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“You really want an answer?”
“Sure.”
He sighed, not wishing to embroil himself in a lengthy discussion or to provoke another wrestling match between the two of them.
“You promise to think about it rationally?” He asked.
“Rationally?  Depends what you mean by that.”
Cal kept his groan to himself.  “I mean no heated arguments or fights about it.  It’s late, all right?”
“Oh, sure, rationally.  No problem.”
“Okay,” he said, settling in his mind the approach he wanted to take.  “It all has to do with evolution and the dignity of man at the top of the evolutionary ladder.  If I don’t allow someone of a different skin color the same rights I have, how can I expect to keep my own rights?”
There was silence from the top bunk.  No rejoinders, no questions.  For the moment, not even the sound of breathing.  He felt the bed shake.  Then he heard it, muffled laughter, like someone using a pillow to deaden the sound.  It went on for a long time.
After a brief silence, he heard Mark John call his name.  “Cal?”
“Yeah.”
“You think maybe you could teach me that judo stuff, too?”



****



Chapter 46

Mertie’s penmanship had never been what you would call elegant.  It wasn’t exactly childish, either, in that overly optimistic way in which some women write, with flower blossoms replacing the dots over i’s, and smiley faces peeping out at you from the o’s.  It was simply the handwriting of someone who’d never had the proper kind of instruction or enough of it.  Perhaps she’d been pulled out of school at the age when she was just about to pick up the knack of writing cursive, just about but not quite.
Mark John was one of the few people who could interpret her chicken scratches without difficulty, which made sense, though he didn’t know it.  He could not yet remember being pulled out of school at about the time he was just about to learn cursive, and that it was Mertie’s handwriting he emulated, copying her scrawl for practice as they drove cross country, always one step ahead of pursuit of one kind or another.  One kind or another meaning not always pursuit by the law.  Bert didn’t much discriminate between offending the law or others as lawless as himself.  He always figured it was a big country--as long as he kept moving, a moving target had the advantage, a philosophy that worked for him for a long time.  His current imprisonment only proved that philosophy, since he’d been arrested after stopping in one place for too long.  But enough about Bert.
Mertie’s letters had always taken twice as long as any other letters to reach Mark John, which for a normal letter could be anywhere from days to weeks because of the prison’s mail censors.  Undoubtedly, her handwriting gave the censors fits.  For different reasons, he now found reading her letter gave him fits, too.  Crumpling the letter into a ball that first time way over a year ago, and then mashing it flat, further obscured what she’d written.  Spotty to begin with, ink vanished in the hills and valleys of the wrinkled paper.  Crumpling it a second time had only worsened matters.  Back at his duties in the Prison Laundry, he gingerly laid the letter out on a steam press to iron it flat, hoping to read it again, this time in its entirety.  Fortunately the first part, the most difficult to make out, was what he had already read and still remembered.
Feb. 26
Dear Marky John,
This is your Mama writing to you.  I know you don’t know, but this is the hardest thing I ever had to say in my whole life, honey.  I just hope you will understand and accept what I have to say.  I never thought a person could change--but since Jesus healed me of my cancer--
Grief wrenched at his gut.  If Jesus healed, why had she died?  How many times had she told people she was dying of cancer, and now it had come true?  He blinked several times, attempting to clear what seemed to be a cloud over his vision, before he went on reading.
You know it’s only right to make peace with your Maker before you die, don’t you?  That’s what I’ve done honey, but I want to make peace with you, too, finally tell the truth.  I guess you probably always knew all along that you weren’t my son or Bert’s either.  We did an awful thing, stealing you from that lady in Calneh.  I just thank God she has forgiven me and Jesus has forgiven me.  Write me and tell me you forgive me too.  The day we took you off the street you told me your name was Duane, but to me it will always be Marky John.
Love You Forever,
Your Mama (the one who stole you)
Mark John felt suddenly dizzy.  Without warning, he doubled over and threw up.  Oscar Lederer came rushing from his office in time to see him puke violently into a canvas clothes bin piled high with clean bed sheets.
Peppering the air with curses, he threw down his cigar.  “Haul him out of here!” He shouted.  “Take him to the infirmary!  I want this mess cleaned up!”
#
The prison orderly, an inmate trained for the job, wrapped a blood pressure cuff around his arm, and commented, “Not feeling so hot, huh, Mr. Davies?”
Mark John couldn’t think of anything but the letters Mertie had written to him in the past few months.  In every one of them she had babbled about Jesus and had begged him to write to Mrs. McIlhenny.  There hadn’t been a word about why she wanted him to write to the woman.
“Mr. Davies?” The prison orderly repeated.
“Davies!” He blurted, looking wonderingly at the man.  Suddenly, his vision seemed much clearer.  “Not Davies,” he said.  “It’s McIlhenny, Duane McIlhenny.”
The orderly inflated the cuff extra tightly.  “Yeah, sure, whatever floats your boat, pal,” he muttered.



****



Part Seven

Chapter 47

A yellow Checker cab let him off at the curb.  He stood reluctantly outside the rusty gate, looking in, a used but good brown suit on his back and a cheap suitcase beside him, both sent to him by his mother.  The house had been freshly painted but its ramshackle condition could not be hidden by a few coats of white paint alone.  To one side there was a stand-alone shed that looked as though it might fall down if anyone breathed too heavily upon it.  But what caught the eye of the man with the suitcase first (or any sightseer passing by) was the yard dotted with statues.
To some the first impression was rightly of a cemetery or one of those monument places devoted to making headstones for the dearly departed.  But to him there was something much more, some pervasive quality beyond even the sacredness of a burial ground.  It was almost as if this was Bethel, a house of God like Jacob had found upon his journey to Paddan Aram, and the angelic statues, in their variety of stone and color, just might be ranks of otherworldly warriors silently awaiting the call to ascend the golden ladder into the heavens.  Here was a place where one could communicate with God.
The moment passed.  Epiphanies never last, but memories of them do.  Once he opened the gate, he knew, he would step from one chapter of his life into another.  Behind lay chiefly misery.  But when he thought about it, and he had thought about it a lot, the years in jail had been a new start all their own, too.  At least there he had learned again who he was, and he did not consider his years of personal study with his cellie a loss.  Ahead?  He was beginning again, making a fresh start, embarking upon a new chapter and a second chance at life.  He didn’t doubt it.  The hope was that this chapter would be something even better, something actually good and joyful.
He opened the gate and stepped inside, closing it behind him.  The pathway to the house had been newly sprinkled with white rock, which crunched pleasantly under his feet.  The lawn was more bright green moss than grass, and interspersed among the statues were varieties of shrubs he couldn’t name.  While the stone statues were obviously the product of a master, the shrubs displayed a more inexpert hand at topiary.  The whimsy of the one and the sacredness of the other brought a smile to his lips.
The door of the house opened before he reached the porch steps.  A pretty black woman, tall and lithe, came out but halted as soon as she saw him.  Behind her were the sounds of a party in full swing, with strains of gospel music and happy voices.  Saying nothing to him but smiling one of those glowing smiles that come easily to some people, she turned and rushed back inside.  No one else saw him climb the stairs.
A towering black man emerged, with the woman hanging back.  The man with the suitcase smiled tentatively.  He wasn’t sure, but he felt he had met the man before.  Certainly, it would have been a long time ago and not under the best of circumstances.  He extended a hand, and the black man did likewise.
“I’m Lamarr,” the taller man said, grinning.  “Your mother’s in the kitchen, waiting for you, Duane.”
“Why are you so late?” The woman asked.
“Oh, by the way, this is my wife, Kyla,” Lamarr said.
Duane was ushered inside before he could answer, and the door was left ajar to share music and light with passersby.  If the party had been exuberant before, it was more so now.  But the neighbors didn’t complain.  Most of them were inside, awaiting his arrival like his mother, and even if anyone had complained about the noise, the cops wouldn’t have done anything because Chance Odoms was there, as well.



****



Chapter 48

Stella Jo’s bedroom door opened slowly.  Rev. Willimon, in his weekday garb of jeans and checked shirt, held a tray with her lunch, the dishes covered by a blue and white tea towel.  A tall glass of iced tea in hand, behind him stood Rev. Champion resplendent as always in black suit, white shirt and black tie.
Stella opened her eyes.  A smile spread slowly across her ravaged face.
“Two of my favorite men,” she said.
John Willimon looked hurt.  “Not the favorite, Sister Stella?”
Apologetically, she said, “Well, there are my twins, Angel and Duane.  They would kinda have to come before you.”
“Then I suppose that’s all right, don’t you think, Brother Cedric?” He asked, setting the tray aside on a dresser bureau.
Cedric set the tea on a familiar-looking doily next to the tray.  Ioletta’s handmade doilies decorated his own bureau at home.
“Oh, I think I can understand her favoring her two sons,” he answered.
Both men helped to fluff up her pillows and to situate them against the padded headboard for her to sit up in bed.
“To be honest,” she said, squinting at them in mock trepidation, “besides the two of them, I would have to put Lamarr in there ahead of the likes of you, too.”
“Lamarr!” Willimon exclaimed.  “Can you believe that, Cedric?  She’s just like everybody else.  I bet she could come up with a whole long list of people she prefers above her own pastor.  And can you believe the disrespect, the likes of you?”
“It does hurt, John,” Cedric replied, his eyes twinkling.  “But it is what I’ve come to expect from people.  Of course, I’ve learned to bless those who curse me and to pray for those who despitefully use me.”
“You two...” she said.  “I suppose you mean to take your revenge by keeping my lunch from me?”
The white minister primly folded his hands in front of his chest.  “What better way to convince you of the error of your ways?”
“Oh, you men!” Ioletta said from the doorway.  “Don’t you know the poor woman’s dyin’?  Let her eat in peace, why don’t you?  Your lame horsin’ around is enough to ’bout kill me.”
She didn’t wait for their reaction, but turned and withdrew into the kitchen.  The three of them stared at one another in momentary shock, and burst into laughter.
“I hear that, and I don’t like it!” Ioletta called.
“Spoken in love,” Cedric said, winking to the others.  Not entirely sure, John Willimon shrugged and, at Stella’s glance toward her dresser, moved the tray over to her bed.  Under the tea towel were a steaming hot bowl of chicken gumbo and a thin wedge of buttered cornbread.
“Do you need help?”
She shook her head at her pastor in a no, evidently conserving her strength.  The soup spoon remained unused in her hand.  The two men exchanged glances.
“Did you have something you wanted to tell us?” Willimon asked.
“About the funeral,” she said, raising one hand to forestall his protests.  This time there was no sense in denying that she was dying.  All three of them felt she had made her last rally, that the time for miraculous recoveries was past.  They had come this far numerous times in the last ten years and seen her brought back from the brink of death through medicine and prayers, yet deep down something told them this time was different.
“I want Reverend Champion for my services,” she said quietly.
“Sister Stella--” Cedric started, glancing worriedly at his fellow minister.
“He--won’t--mind,” she said, her strength suddenly reduced to dribs and drabs  “He doesn’t like--doing funerals.  I want someone who won’t make a dirge out of it.”
Grimly, he turned to Willimon, who cautiously lowered himself to a sitting position on the bed.  His expression looked for all the world, to Cedric, like relief.
“Sister Stella,” he said, covering her hand with his own.
Her gaze shifted, only her eyes moving in his direction.
Gently, he asked, “How’s your walk with the Lord?”  If Ioletta had heard Willimon, she would have uttered a disapproving snort.  Ask such a question of Stella Jo McIlhenny?  But as long as he drew breath he would ask that question or one like it:  “Are you saved, brother?”  “Are you saved, sister?”  “Do you know if you’ll go to heaven when you die?”  He might not be the one-note preacher of his younger days, when week in, week out, every sermon had pounded home the need to be saved, but it was best not to wander far from themes of salvation as you sat at the death bed of a loved one.
The way he saw it, which was not the way you or I would necessarily see it, not being preachers, he didn’t want anyone’s blood on his hands.  He couldn’t endure the thought of one day standing before God, God asking, “Did you tell William Robert about my gift of eternal life to those who have their sins washed away by the blood of my Son?  If you couldn’t do it at his death bed, when did you plan on doing it?  How about Mary Margaret?  Or Bertha Lee?”
There was an additional benefit, too, as he saw it.  It was good for the dying person, especially reassuring, for the believer, to once again acknowledge that he or she was saved.  With the heart one believes and with the mouth one confesses.  What better way to go through death’s door and enter Heaven’s gates?  None of that junk about fingering a pagan rosary.
“It is well,” she murmured, her eyes fluttering with weariness.  He leaned closer.  “Believin’ and receivin’,” she said.
Her head sagged to one side.  He stared anxiously.  Truth to tell, in John Willimon’s dozen or so years of pastoring, he had not sat beside all that many death beds.  Not many Billy Bobs, Mary Margarets (who would naturally have preferred a priest at their bedside, considering that sort of name), or Bertha Lees.
“Is she gone?” He blurted.  “She didn’t eat her soup.”
Cedric smiled, restraining a laugh.  Where she was going, he figured she wouldn’t exactly need soup.  He looked, saw that the counterpane over her chest rose and fell slightly.  The pulse at her throat was barely perceptible.
No, he shook his head.  “Just resting, I think.”
Quietly, almost in a whisper, Willimon asked, “What do we do now?”
From the doorway, Ioletta whispered, “You two couldn’t even persuade her into eatin’ a little soup?”
“John, I think we’ll let her rest, now,” Cedric told Willimon, patting him on the shoulder, knowing that Stella’s passing might take hours or that today might not be the day.  To Ioletta, he said, “If you need us, give us a call.”
Ioletta shook her head at the backs of the departing ministers.  How was Stella Jo to build her strength up, when she wouldn’t eat?  She carried the tray back to the kitchen and set it on the counter.  Maybe she would be hungry later.  Feeling at loose ends, she looked around, searching inside the lower cabinets and the refrigerator for something to do.
She wouldn’t have expected it, him being an ex-con, but Duane was a neat young man, of the stripe who doesn’t care to find anything out of place.  Everything was sorted and stacked properly, had its own place, and was spotless besides, which her friend had never been able to manage by herself.
His clothing was the same way.  If it didn’t have a proper crease, he wouldn’t wear it, including his blue jeans.  Probably the only thing he didn’t iron, when it came to his personal clothing, was his socks.  Likely, she thought, he had learned all those things in prison.  Angel and he might be twins, but when it came to neatness, they were opposites; the only perfection his brother demanded of himself was in his art.
Ioletta was scrubbing the kitchen sink with Bon Ami and a yellow Dobie pad, when Duane came in from outside.  Most sinks, no matter how much you scrub them, can use a little more.
“Is she all right?” He asked.
“See for yo’self,” she said, bearing down hard on the scouring pad.
Perhaps ten minutes more passed by, before the sink finally began to take on the polish she expected of it.  Duane was neat, but her standards were higher.  It was about then that Duane spoke to her from the bedroom doorway.  Engrossed in her work of refining something he certainly should have done himself, she didn’t much pay attention.
The white porcelain glowed, contrasting nicely with her black arms.  She toweled out the sink and draped the towel on its metal rack to dry, satisfied she had done all she could do.  Nobody best use the kitchen sink for the next week or two, or she would be upset!
Careful of stray water drops, she filled a glass from the tap.
“You want a little drink of water, Stella Jo?” She called out.  Her heart dropped, as she walked into the bedroom.  The bedcovers were neatly in place, but Stella had vanished!  Thoughts of the Rapture flashed through her mind, of men, women and children shooting heavenward, out of their clothes, like ICBM missiles shaking free from their silos, at the blessed event of His Second Coming.  She had missed it.  She had been left behind!
Her free hand to her bosom, she wondered if that had been the loud noise she’d heard earlier, a house rattling boom!  She’d thought it was a jet overhead.  Funny.  She hadn’t heard any trumpets sounding.  Wasn’t there supposed to be a trumpet?  Suddenly, she remembered she had heard the loud booming noise much earlier in the day.
Probably not the Rapture, not just yet.  Glancing down, she saw that Stella’s slippers were gone.  Water glass still in hand, she leaned over and pulled the bed covers back with her other hand.  No sign of Stella’s flannel nightgown, either.  If the Lord Jesus had come for her, she had done gone along for the ride in her pyjamas and slippers.
Constrained by her sense of orderliness, she set the water glass on the dresser, beside the tea left by Rev. Champion, and neatly resettled the bedcovers.  She recovered quickly.  Obviously, Duane had taken her somewhere, likely outside to the porch swing, which he had recently installed.  The boy was handy; in that regard, he was a lot like her Lamarr, always working on the place.  Still, he shouldn’t be taking his mother outside, not in her condition, even in the warm weather.
Anxious, Ioletta went to the living room.  One glance through the windows told her that Duane had not taken his mother outside to the porch swing; it hung emptily by its chains from the rafters, a slight breeze pushing it back and forth as if ghosts occupied its vinyl cushions.
She ran down the stairs, looking first one way and then another, her eyes as big as blackberry pies, as her stepmother used to say so many years ago.  Save for the statues, the yard was empty.  As she neared the street, walking briskly, she felt chills run up and down her spine.  No traffic, either.  No children playing on the sidewalks.  No other human being in sight.
Rev. Champion had been preaching on Bible prophecy for the past two months on Sunday evenings.  That was why she thought of the Rapture when she first saw Stella and Duane were gone.  Rev. Champion had shot down all the popular theories that sold a lot of books but didn’t, he felt, have much to do with what the Bible really taught.  Still, the thought of one taken in the field and one left behind, of one taken from the bed and another left behind (the latter so close to her own situation), understandably had a chilling effect upon her heart and mind.
Maybe the last trump had blown and the Lord had spoken with the voice of the archangel.  Maybe she hadn’t heard because she hadn’t been meant to, because she had been deaf to the voice of the Shepherd.  Maybe she had been left to suffer through the Great Tribulation all by herself!
She had reached the gate and looked both ways, anxiously hoping to see somebody, anybody, when she suddenly heard the sound of birds singing.  Would birds sing after the Rapture?  Seconds later, a car sped by from the direction of Flowers Baptist, its driver not glancing her way, seemingly unworried by the non-existent traffic, gospel music providentially blaring from the open windows.  Then a harsh but welcome noise reached her ears.  In the far corner of the yard, partially hidden behind a block of stone, Angel worked a rasp over his newest project.
Puffing her cheeks out in a breath of relief, she returned to the porch and lowered herself into the swing.  As she sat there, pushing off with her legs, gently propelling herself back and forth, she began to sing, beginning with Amazing Grace and following up with The Old Rugged Cross.  Though it was nowhere near Christmas, she sang Go Tell It On The Mountain, wishing Hermione was sitting beside her, singing along, even if most people didn’t care to hear a duet, not when Hermione was around to do the singing.
Finally she saw Duane approaching from the direction of her own house, carrying his sleeping mother in his arms like he might any small child.  The boy was strong, his chest deep like Angel’s, his arms heavily corded with muscle, but the now frail Stella was no real burden anyhow; leukemia had seen to that.
Duane gave Ioletta a nod, one that communicated he had something to say but for the moment must wait, as he went past the swing and into the house to put his mother to bed.
“Where all did the two of you wander off to?” She asked, when he came back out.
“To see Anna Lee Odoms,” he said, taking a seat beside her and unconcernedly letting his gaze wander over the street.  He might have been nervous for the chains holding the swing, if it had been the old Ioletta he sat beside.  But then, he didn’t remember her from the years she was round as a pumpkin.  “Didn’t you hear me ask you?”
“Well...” she said, thinking back.  She had heard him say something.  Could be the water was running while she scoured the sink, too busy to listen to what he wanted to say.  All that worrying about the Rapture had been for nothing.  All because of pride, too, having to prove she could polish the sink better than anyone else, especially him.
In an apologetic tone of voice, she said, “You was gone an awful long spell.  Your mother is dyin’ and don’t need no trips around the block.”
“I wish you coulda been there, Ioletta.  They made me set her in the gazebo.  Have you ever seen it?  You would have thought she had died and gone to heaven, the look she had on her face.”
He let out a low whistle, the same kind that men reserve mostly for sleek automobiles and pretty women.
“In their gazebo?  What fo’?”
“Beats the heck out of me.  Momma and Mrs. Odoms just looked at each other for a long time, and Captain Odoms and I took a hint, walked around their back yard for the most part.”
Ioletta’s brow furrowed in thought.
“Their back yard is—is like some kind of wonderland,” he said.  “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Hmmph,” Ioletta snorted, rising from the swing.  “Never have seen it, don’t s’pose I ever will.”
She let the door slam behind her, as she went inside to check on Stella.
“You never know,” he said, shaking his head, remembering the gazebo.  In that yard, surrounded by the twists and turns of intertwined, sculpted hedges and brightly colored bursts of flowers, the structure had seemed to hover as though in mid-space, weightless as a snowflake.  Entering it had been like setting foot on another world, or more like stepping into a doorway leading to another world.
“You just never know,” he muttered, still marveling.  If there was a prettier yard in the world than Anna Lee’s, he would sure like to see it.  What’s more, if heaven was as pretty as her yard, he could hardly wait to go there.



****



Chapter 49

The day after Stella’s trip to Anna Lee’s, Ioletta sadly watched over her, comforting herself with birdlike nibbles from a peanut butter and banana sandwich, even as the bird of death seemed to be nibbling away at Stella’s life.  Ioletta had tried, without success, to spoon chicken noodle soup into Stella’s mouth, and as someone who’d sat at more than one death bed in her life, she knew her friend was not long for this world.  It seemed that Stella was constantly drifting off to sleep, and in between moments opened her eyes just long enough to look over in her direction.
“What did your father ever do to you, Ioletta?” Stella asked.
Ioletta rolled her eyes in exasperation.  “You should save your strenth, girl, don’t be axin’ me that question.”
Stella’s mind was still there.  Ioletta could almost see the wheels turning.  Slow and labored like, but still turning.
“You never told me you forgave him.”
Ioletta sighed deeply.  For good reason, she had not told about forgiving her father.  Telling her so would have been a lie.
“What--what did he ever do to you?”
“He was a man,” she said.
This time, Stella rolled her eyes.
“He was a wicked, evil man.  That’s what he was.”
Stella stared unblinkingly.  For a moment, Ioletta wondered if she was still with her, or if she had passed through the veil.  Sometimes people went that quickly, and if you didn’t take a closer look--
Stella startled her by suddenly scratching at one ear.  It seemed she had simply paused to gather her strength.  “You just remember the words of Jesus,” she scolded.  “If you want your Heavenly Father to forgive you--”
“You must forgive others,” Ioletta said, finishing the sentence for her to save her the energy.  Sitting at her bedside, staring at her, she decided that if anyone deserved to preach on forgiveness, it was Stella.  Probably no one else she knew qualified like she did.  A lot of folks could preach it just fine but came by it cheaply, had not really paid the price.  Which nevertheless did not mean she felt like talking about her father.  Why spoil these last few moments among the bestest of friends?
“He sold me!” She blurted, biting her lip afterwards, drawing blood, shocked at the emotions she felt welling up.  For over forty years they had been locked away, and now the words poured forth, punctuated by gasping and groaning.  Eleven years old.  That was the age she’d been, when her father began selling her to men, most of them whites.  Some of those white men were the very ones who’d cheated him out of his land.  Her mother had died of a broken heart over it, able to do nothing, forgiving neither her husband and his brutal ways nor the whites, who she saw as no worse than he was.
Ioletta did not weep a single tear, as she at long last told her story.  The anger rose up like a raging furnace, burning away the tears before they could reach her eyes.  Stella Jo looked on silently, evidently unsurprised, saying nothing to either comfort and console, or to criticize, or to reprove her.  At length, Ioletta fell silent, too, except for the rasping, seething breaths that ventilated her smoldering memories.
“And that wasn’t all of it, neither,” she spoke in a whisper.  “When I was thirteen...”  Her voice drifted off, her eyes on some distant, interior scene.  As though stiffening for the coming impact, Stella sat up in bed, waiting.
“I came down pregnant.  By a white man or by one of Daddy’s customers in the medicine business, I don’t know.  Did you ever have someone shove you down a hill, Stella Jo?”
“No,” she said, tears in her voice but not on her face.
“That’s what my daddy did, when he found out.  Took me in his car way up in the woods.  Then we stopped and he pushed me out the door.  Took me by the arm and drug me to the edge of the road.  Do you want to hear more?”
“God forgive him,” Stella said.  “God have mercy on his soul.”
“God have mercy,” Ioletta blurted reflexively, falling silent again, surprised the words had popped out of her mouth.
Stella’s gaze shifted in a long, slow revolution about the room.  Ioletta, seeing light seemingly kindled in her friend’s eyes, felt prickles up and down the back of her neck.
“I feel--feel the presence of Jesus!” Stella said.
Feeling that presence as well, Ioletta stood suddenly, her hands shooting skyward in spontaneous worship.  Words began rolling from her lips, words of praise and adoration, spoken and in song, some of it in English, some of it a language she didn’t understand, what some call tongues, others ecstatic utterance, others gibberish.
The Presence was too strong for her to keep her eyes open, which were streaming with tears.  Her hair felt as though it was standing on end.  She knew it wasn’t, but it felt that way.  At the same time, chills ran up and down her spine, and she cried out, sinking to her knees, “Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, thank you, thank you Jesus! Jesus Jesus Jesus--Thank you, Lord Jesus!”
As the Presence grew stronger, her heart felt it was breaking and would soon burst into flame.  Her breath came in gasps, and groans too deep for words rose up from the depths of her soul.  Minutes passed, or maybe it was hours.  It was not the kind of thing you can measure in human terms, that kneeling in the presence of the Eternal One, lost to the world but found in the spirit.  But eventually there was a sense of ebbing to this tide that had washed in on her soul, and then it was gone, leaving in its wake a deep sense of peace.  Then she saw that Stella Jo was gone, and she wept.
Tears running down his face, Duane walked in and closed his mother’s eyes.  Standing at the open doorway, leaning heavily on his elbow crutches, Angel softly hummed Beulah Land, while a smile played at the corners of his mouth.
#
Reverend Champion was one of those preachers who didn’t know how to make a funeral out of a funeral, setting the necessary tone of solemn mourning and dignified depression, unless the funeral was for someone who was unsaved.  Even then he would make a valiant attempt at pointing out the deceased’s best qualities and how people should emulate him or her.  Not the person, mind you; he didn’t want any of the mourners emulating someone who hadn’t the good sense to be saved and get on the road to heaven instead of to the bad place, not when the gift of eternal life was free and offered to all.  Normally, he didn’t take those kind of funerals, though, and except for the fact that those kind were good opportunities in which to point up the necessity of being born again (and he always told the mourning family that if they wanted him officiating, that was what they could expect to hear), he would not have taken one of them at all.  If they didn’t like it, they could find someone else to do the job, maybe a Justice of the Peace or someone from the Unitarian Church.  Besides, he figured he could do as he pleased, since he was old fashioned enough to refuse being paid for performing funerals, just as he also refused pay for doing weddings.  If you were a member of the church, you could expect certain duties from your pastor: weddings and funerals, just like regular preaching, were among them.  Even for neighbors in the community, who’d attended the “big church” all their lives, never darkening the doorway of Alliance Baptist, he only charged for the use of the church building and the cleanup afterwards.  Approve of it or not, that was his philosophy.
The way he saw it, Stella’s funeral couldn’t be one of his regular sort of funerals, either, where one naturally expected a whole lot of rejoicing, of singing, shouting, and dancing because the deceased has taken that highway of gold she can now see with her own eyes instead of with the eyes of faith only.  Yes, all of us are the same at the foot of the cross, regardless of gender, race, or financial status; he wouldn’t have argued that.  All Christian believers are special to God (but so are unbelievers; otherwise, why would He have sent His Son to die on the cross?); but then again, every once in a while there is one who is also extra special to believers and unbelievers alike, to friends and neighbors, to those they’ve worked with, and to those who’ve simply happened to cross their path.  That was the case with Sister Stella.
Still, as he sat in his office, he wondered how and what he should preach for her funeral.  It wasn’t like he would write out a nice long sermon, of the three-point variety or otherwise; he seldom ever wrote out his sermons.  If a man who constantly read and studied his Bible and prayed and stayed in communion with God couldn’t preach at the drop of a hat, something was wrong with him.  The point being, if he couldn’t be a clear and clean conduit for the Spirit of God to speak to people, then something was wrong that needed correcting, and he wouldn’t have been able to write a sermon anyhow.  Not that he faulted other preachers for writing everything they preached, some putting down every word on paper, others simply jotting down a few notes for reference.  Certainly, though, his gift was to be an open conduit unhindered by either sin or the need to manipulate others…
Stella Jo McIlhenny, whom he usually called Sister Stella, should be easy to eulogize.  She was like a Biblical Joseph and Ruth and Job and Dorcas, all rolled into one, the suffering servant who overcomes every adversity, character shining through like gold.  Such a believer could stand before the Master and joyfully expect to hear the resounding, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant!”
He could almost hear those words himself and see the pride radiating from the Master’s face, as He welcomed her into the heavenly city, capital of the universe both seen and unseen.  Crowds gathered around a gate of pearl, singing and shouting a thunderous victory greeting.  He was lost in reverie, wondering if what passed through his mind was in reality a peek into the spirit world, when his office intercom buzzed rudely.
“Pastor?  Miz Anna Lee Odoms is here to see you.”
Anna Lee Odoms?  His hands flew reflexively to his necktie for a quick adjustment.  What on earth could possibly bring Chance’s wife to Alliance Baptist?
“Please let her in, Ruby,” he told his secretary, then immediately stood, hastening to open his office door.  He set the doorstop, making sure the door would not swing shut while he had a female visitor, and greeted Anna Lee with a pleasant smile.
“Reverend Champion.”
“Miz Odoms,” he replied, taking note of her tear-stained face as he showed her to one of the chairs that faced his desk.  Rather than retreat behind his desk, he dropped to one knee beside her and cradled her hand in his own oversized mitts.
“Is it something you would like prayer about, sister?” He asked, his eyes large with concern.
She dissolved into tears, withdrawing her hand and covering her face, while he waited, head bowed, praying for her to regain her composure and for whatever heartache she suffered.
The moments seemed to stretch into minutes.  He was feeling the discomfort of remaining on one knee, and uncomfortable in the presence of this weeping woman.  It didn’t help that she was the most elegant white woman he knew, wife of a man who was not only a police official but somebody with whom he’d had his share of disagreements.
“Does this have to do with Sister McIlhenny?” He asked, silently discounting a raft of other possibilities that came to mind.
“Yes,” she sobbed, reaching into her fashionable purse for a tissue.
“Sister McIlhenny is in the presence of Jesus, now,” he said, coming up from his knee, recognizing the perfect moment for returning to his own chair.
She snapped her purse shut, and dabbed at her eyes.  “I know,” she said.  “It’s about the funeral.”
His eyebrows arched in surprise.  Was she here to tell him that he could not perform the services?  If so, she would be sorely disappointed; even John Willimon would insist that Stella’s final request be met.  He wasn’t about to back out on a promise he’d made to a dying woman, even if all the crackers in the great state of Alabama objected to his burying a white woman.
“Yes?” He said, steeling himself for the attack.  Tears or bullets were all the same to him.  No one would change his mind.
“You have the use of my back yard for the service.”  Her voice was husky, deeply affected with grief.  “I’ve thought this all out.  The gate is sufficient for a hearse to drive through, if you wish, and there is ample room for folding chairs.”
“What?” He asked, disbelieving his ears.  She couldn’t have said what he thought she’d said.
“You’re to use my back yard for Stella’s service.”
“Your back yard?”
“She loved my gazebo!” She blurted, dissolving again in tears.
“Your back yard?” He repeated, his voice rising incredulously.  He had never seen it himself--had heard rumors but never seen it.  Images of a multitude, black-brown-yellow-white, flashed through his mind, of grief-stricken mourners trampling the grounds of a delicate flower garden.
“I don’t think so, ma’am,” he objected.  “You wouldn’t believe the damage a few careless people could do.”
She rose to her feet, sniffing back tears and clutching her purse to her waist.  “Da-da-darn it all, Brother Champion!  Don’t you worry about damages to that little ol’ back yard of mine.  It’s what Stella Jo asked of me before she died, and it’s what she’ll have, not what you want.”
As unbelievable as it may seem, that’s how it came about that Stella’s funeral was held in Anna Lee’s back yard that Saturday, with the gazebo steps as Rev. Champion’s preaching platform and the floor of the gazebo itself as the funeral bier.
Marveling at the size and diversity of the crowd, Cedric felt a sudden impulse to change his sermon.  His intention had been, after dispensing the usual chronological details of the deceased’s life, to preach on how Christ’s sacrifice was the bridge between God and man, and likewise how Stella’s life had been a bridge between the communities on either side of Flowers Ave.  Instead, he now began to tell a series of stories.  The first was about Jesus walking to Emmaus with two of His disciples.  The second was about the Good Samaritan.  The third was about Judgment Day, when God would reward those who had ministered to the least of these, My brethren.  What had all of them thought when they saw Stella Jo Pierce McIlhenny?  Had any of them thought she was special?  Beautiful?  Wise?  Stylish?  Intellectually scintillating?  How many of them had fed her when she was hungry?  Paid her bills when she was ill?  Helped with her housekeeping or her yard work?  Indeed, hadn’t she been like Christ walking among them, unrecognized by his own disciples on that road to Emmaus?  Or perhaps she’d been like an angel in their midst, and them unaware of it?  Indeed, hadn’t she been a Good Samaritan to all, without thought of personal reward?  Indeed, hadn’t she been considered by most to be one of the least among them, someone who would never be rich, or famous, or politically influential?
Then why were there so many people at her funeral?  Why had the chairs been put aside so that the crowds could be squeezed in?  Why so many tears, and why would there be so much singing to come?  The answer, as he gave it, though he had not meant to conclude his sermon this way, was to say that like Christ, whose sacrifice was the bridge between God and man, Stella Jo Pierce McIlhenny’s sacrificial life had become a bridge between whites and African Americans on Flowers Avenue.  Without fanfare, notoriety, or the prospect of reward that could be seen with human eyes, she had accomplished what politicians and preachers had never been able to do.  Now that she was gone, now that the Master had promoted her to the ranks of heaven and deservedly awarded her crowns, would any of them step into the gap, live as she had lived, bring healing to the churches--to the ’hood--to Calneh?  Were there any who wanted to join Stella in making their world a street of angels?
Of course he had concluding remarks upon his concluding remarks.  The main one was a question: Was there anyone who didn’t know the driving force in Sister Stella’s life?  Was there anyone who wanted to bow for a brief prayer to meet her Master?  Were there any who wanted people to some day celebrate their passing like they were for Sister Stella?
A dozen hands went up.  He called those people aside, and before he quietly began to minister to them, he gave Rev. Willimon the microphone.  John asked if there was anyone who wanted to share a story about Sister Stella.  Immediately, hands went up.  Hermione recounted the day she had met her at the county jail and what it had meant to her, and how Stella had invited her to a picnic and brought her to repentance.  Theodora brokenly related the story of Alliance’s fire (omitting Erwin’s part in the matter) and how Stella had seen to the sale of two of her son’s sculptures for the rebuilding of the church.  Carl Rames, Jefferson Davis Elementary’s first black principal, told of how she had been a model of perseverance to him.  Mr. Takesugi, with his interpreter at his side, haltingly spoke in English of her graciousness to a stranger in Calneh.
Scores of people could have spoken of her generosity, of freely letting out her property for their vegetable gardens (until her health had finally failed her), and the Sunday dinners she spearheaded to feed the less fortunate in the neighborhood, but it took only Ioletta, her co-laborer, backed up, of course, by a chorus of amens.
To some in attendance, perhaps the biggest surprise was that Duane spoke not a word, though most would have allowed it was because of his grief, or that he simply was not the extroverted type, easily able to speak before crowds of more than a dozen.  Regardless, after the first few had spoken of their friend now passed into heavenly realms, the floodgates opened.  People crowded the steps of the gazebo, clamoring for the microphone, which Rev. Willimon kept firmly in his grasp, ready to assist but not willing to allow anyone to wander from the purpose at hand.  He glanced in alarm at Cedric, as the numbers swelled.  It would be nightfall before everyone had spoken, if something was not done.
Cedric, wise in the ways of weddings and funerals, took the microphone and asked for silence.
“When you all are done here, Reverend Johnny will deliver the benediction,” he announced, his voice rumbling pleasantly.  “Afterwards, the services in honor of our dear sister will adjourn to the cemetery for all who wish to come for the interment.  And after that--well, after that, all are welcome to Alliance Baptist for a time of food and fellowship.”
What might have taken hours was cut to 20 minutes.  People reasoned, rightly so, too, that much of what they wanted to say could be said over dinner.  Rev. Willimon bowed his head and uttered the benediction.  That was perhaps when the most electrifying part of the celebration occurred.  During the prayer, which was longer-winded than necessary (to those eager to move on to Alliance’s fellowship hall for eats), people saw Angel hobble up to the minister on his elbow crutches and hold out one hand.
Sensing Angel’s presence, his eyes opened before his utterance of the “Amen.”
“Brother Angel?”
Angel motioned for the microphone.  Willimon gave it over, at the same time glancing wonderingly at Cedric, who nodded in approval.  Angel cleared his throat.
For a long moment, the world in Anna Lee Odoms’ back yard held its breath.  There were few in the multitude who had not heard Stella’s stories of how Angel could talk, that he just never seemed to want to, even if none of them had ever actually heard him utter a single word.  Was he to speak now?  Or, as Ioletta always thought, had Stella’s tales been nothing more than a fantasy to comfort her own mother-heart?
Anticipation built, as Angel cleared his throat again.  He tottered, laboring speechlessly over the microphone.  Maybe he could only croak like a frog.  That’s what everyone thought they heard--one or two croaking sounds.  Anticipation quickly turned to uneasiness, and the uneasiness to painful, sweeping embarrassment.  His tongue ran over his weathered lips.  Once more he cleared his throat.
In the next instant they heard him begin to hum.  Coming from him, the sound was more eloquent than any words most of us are ever likely to speak.  The tune was Will the Circle Be Unbroken?  As on the day Hermione, the prodigal daughter, had come to the picnic and returned to the Heavenly Father, his humming was more like the music of angels than of men.  Through the first verse no one moved, not even to wipe away tears, and no one seemed able to breathe.  On the chorus, Hermione came and linked arms with Angel.  As tears ran unchecked down his face, she took up the song, beginning again from the top, her voice soaring over the crowd.  On the second verse, the musicians joined in and the crowd began singing along.
In some ways the celebration was just beginning.  Calneh is not at all like New Orleans, especially when it comes to funerals like you see in the movies or on TV, or read about in the National Geographic, where the mourners accompany the funeral bier in a train of humanity, everyone dressed to the nines, singing When The Saints Go Marching In and expressing their grief in the language of jazz.  Leastwise, Calneh is not usually like that--but there was definitely that flavor to it, if perhaps somewhat diluted by Flowers Baptist’s more straitlaced members.  The musicians continued on their instruments and started out, the crowd parting for them to make their way from Anna Lee’s yard.  The pallbearers followed with the coffin and were trailed by Angel, who bumped along in company with Duane, his twin brother.  Supported by Lamarr (in his full-dress Army Major’s uniform), Ioletta was next, followed by Hermione, who walked hand in hand with two teenagers, Theron and Luke.  Yet more musicians followed before the multitude, everyone singing as they went, squeezed through the gate and eventually trickled out of sight.
Anna Lee watched from the gazebo’s steps, while Chance bolted shut the six foot high gate to their back yard.  She saw him frown, his eyes surveying the damage to shrubbery and flowers alike, as he walked back to her.
He watched as she dried her tears on a lace hanky.  “One thing about plants, they do grow back,” he said, sighing heavily.
“It doesn’t matter one whit, darling.”
“Really?” He said, giving her a curious look.
She stood and brushed off her dress, then took his arm and aimed him toward the house.
“Really,” she said.  “In a few weeks I’ll be preparing it for a vegetable garden, so why should it matter?”
“Vegetable garden!” He started, dumbfounded by the idea.  His wife had never before been interested in raising vegetables.
“Not for us, darling, for the neighborhood.”



****



AFTERWORD

I think you would be pretty hard pressed to recognize the old place on Flowers Ave., if you drove up to it nowadays.  Of course, most of the old timers wouldn’t recognize Flowers Ave., either, if they hadn’t stayed around to see all the changes the Yuppies brought, including the rise in property values and taxes.  I don’t know how a lot of them make it on their limited incomes, but somehow they keep hanging in there.  Although, when it comes down to it, there are neighbors who likely help them when things are tight.  I know some folks who give regularly to help out but keep it on the hush-hush because they want all the credit to go to God.
Momma’s place, as you know from reading this, was long overdue for improvement.  The first year or two after I was let out of jail, I couldn’t find work much better than busing tables at a restaurant because of my being an ex-con, so I started working on the house.  I can’t say I jacked up the house and put in the new foundation all by myself or personally redid the plumbing to the street (I was smart enough to know better now rather than later), but the Craftsman style exterior was all my work.  The interior took longer than the rest because I wanted everything perfect, and people tell me they think it’s real special.  Cal, my old cellie (who taught me drafting and all I really know about reading and writing), when he saw it, his eyes about popped out of his head.  Pretty much the only thing I haven’t gotten around to doing up right is the porch, which mostly just needs the screens built in to keep out bugs on hot summer evenings.
It’s a good thing my daddy taught me how to work, even if we were on the road most of the time.  Bert Davies knew how to work.  It’s just a shame he spent most of his life figuring how to avoid it by stealing from others.  Looking back now, thinking about him kidnapping me, I almost wonder if he didn’t grab me just because he was too lazy to make a kid of his own.  Certainly, he wasn’t the sort you could feature doing those things that need to be done afterwards, like changing diapers or feeding a kid, or tossing him a baseball when he’s old enough.
I wrote and asked Bert about that once, but he never did answer my letter.  I imagine he smiled, though, when he read it.  He might have cussed a bit, too, but I bet he had a chuckle, after he thought about it for a while.  Bert wasn’t stupid--a fool maybe, but not stupid.
Some people, reading this, might be offended by my calling Ol’ Bert my daddy, especially when he stole me away from Leonard and Stella Jo like he did.  But to defend myself, I really don’t remember anything of Leonard and living here with him and my real mother and my twin brother.  The only memory I have of a father is Bert, of traveling around with him and Mertie from a young age, keeping one step ahead of the law, though early on I didn’t understand anything of that.  Some people might wonder, too, how I could completely forget my own folks and living in Calneh on Flowers Ave. and going to school at Jeff Davis Elementary, when I was as old as six or seven when Bert and Mertie grabbed me.  The only answer I can give is to say I don’t understand it myself.  All I know, being on the road, moving around a whole heck of a lot, and being told to properly introduce myself as Mark John Davies all the time, those are the things I remember from my childhood.  If people don’t like that answer, I can’t help it.  Besides that, the only other thing I really remember about my early childhood is the nightmares, of being grabbed by aliens and carried away in a space ship.  But you know about that from reading this book, and I really don’t like talking about that alien junk because it gives me the creeps.
Not that anybody really wants to hear that much about me, anyhow, especially after reading about what a jerk I was to my mother and brother later on.  There must have been something in me, though, that wouldn’t let me completely forget my folks and Flowers Avenue.  Otherwise, why would I have crashed my Camaro through the fence and broken down the door to the house, if there wasn’t something hidden away in my brain to call me home?  I don’t mean to minimize the idea of God answering my mother’s prayers.  But did God have to send me to jail for nearly ten years?
I know, some people have told me yes, that it took that long to straighten me back around, and jail was what finally did it.  This sovereignty of God thing confuses me, at times.  Me, there are times I just like to ask Him if he knows what He’s doing.  But don’t get me wrong, I don’t ask it irreverently.  Sometimes I just wonder if He’s sure.
My brother, Michael, who everyone around here except for myself calls Angel, I don’t think he ever asks those kinds of questions.  Even if he did, I don’t suppose he would tell anybody about it, considering he still doesn’t say more than a handful of words in any given year.  My theory is that hidden inside his twisted, deformed body, there’s really this magnificent place, this place where he spends most of his livelong days talking with God and singing songs of worship that we only hear as that constant humming of his.  For the rest, his statue making and all, that’s an expression of his hands, I guess, imitating God, seeing Him making people out of the dust.  I don’t know for sure, mind you--it’s just a guess on my part.
He does most of his work indoors now.  Once the neighborhood started improving and a lot of the newcomers involved themselves in local politics and in their neighborhood associations, they forced everybody into cleaning up their yards.  They certainly didn’t want our place looking like a cemetery.
I can’t say their meddling bothered me much.  Before they ever came knocking on our door, I had drawn up plans for a new, higher fence and a proper workshop where Michael could work in comfort year round on his projects.  That’s what the building with the massive skylights and sliding barn doors is for.  I knew Michael wouldn’t care for it if it wasn’t like working outdoors, not after years of having the sun shine down on the back of his neck.  People from out of town, or from around the world, like to think of it as Michael’s studio, and of course it’s where they come when they want to buy one of his angel sculptures.
When I’m not working on the house or drawing up plans to help out one of the local architects, I negotiate the sale of his statues for him and do the traveling to make sure they’re properly installed.  In the States, at least.  On account of my felony, Cecily Odoms takes care of the details when we sell anything for overseas.  She lived in Europe for a lot of years before coming back home to help move her folks to Lake Havasu for their retirement.  Havasu’s a town out in the state of Arizona, if you don’t know.  They thought they’d like to move to some place where it wasn’t so humid or rainy, and the doctor recommended it because of Captain Odoms’ emphysema.
It looks like Cecily might stick around, too.  Folks around here wouldn’t be too surprised to see her marry Lamarr, who took over preaching for Rev. Champion at Alliance after retiring from the Army as a colonel.  You bet it would make some people uncomfortable, though most folks would understand, I think, them growing up practically as neighbors, and him losing his pretty wife Kyla when a damned drunk plowed into her car last year.  Rev. Lamarr’s tough, though, he was back to preaching a week later, even though old Rev. Champion could have filled in for him.  I’ll bet the old folks would have loved to see Rev. Champion in the pulpit a little longer, even if he is in his nineties--but Lamarr, he does all right for himself.  Alliance Baptist has just kept on growing ever since he took over the reins.  In fact, now and then there’re a lot of white folks who attend his church.  Michael goes there at least half the time, I’d say, although I suppose it might be mostly to hear Hermione sing or one of her choirs.
Myself, I prefer Flowers Baptist next door.  For my tastes, all that shouting and carrying on is a bit much.  Besides, Rev. Johnny has me ushering every Sunday, says I’m his right hand man.  The church has grown so much in the past few years, he certainly needs a right hand man.  Once in a while, when he or his assistant, Rev. Ronnie Tatum, can’t be around, he even has me help with his Wednesday night prayer meeting.  I just wish my momma, Stella Jo, was still here to see all that’s been happening and how her sons are doing.  I think she’d be real proud.  I know Momma Ioletta sure is proud of us boys.

THE END



To the Reader
If you enjoyed the free Smashwords Edition of this book, Street of Angels, please consider sending a donation of any size to Iris Ministries, a mission devoted to feeding orphans in Mozambique and other African countries.  Donations may be made online to www.irismin.org or to www.irismin.com, or by snailmail to Iris Ministries, PO BOX 493995, Redding, CA 96049-3995.


About the Author
As of this writing, Joe Derkacht lives in Newberg, Oregon, where he is the sole caregiver for his elderly mother.  He has lived up and down the West Coast, in cities large and small, and grew up in a small beach community (pop. 247) where he had plenty of time to fantasize about future writing projects.  He has been involved in lay ministry for many years and earned a diploma in biblical studies from The King’s College in Los Angeles, California: hence his  interest in religious-themed literature.  He has also written novels and screenplays in the Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Spy-Thriller genres, some of which he may later release as ebooks.